In the Studio: Eric Fischl

Photo by Joseph Maida

The artist in his studio with the a work in progress. Fischl says he loves the idea of "discovery and execution happening simultaneously on the canvas."

Photo by Joseph Maida

In the Studio: Eric Fischl

April Gornik Ross Bleckner Auguste Rodin David Salle Eric Fischl Auction to Coincide with Art Basel Miami Beach Wrangling Over Resales [Husbands and] Wives

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

For a slide show that includes several unpublished images, click on the photo gallery to the left.

LONG ISLAND—Eric Fischl finally paints in peace. No longer distracted by blaring sirens, rumbling trucks and taxi drivers beeping their car horns outside his SoHo loft, Fischl now works in a spacious, airy studio deep in the woods near Sag Harbor, on Long Island. In this pastoral setting, where he and his wife, landscapist April Gornik, share a home and matching studios, birds chirp in trees and light creates dappled patterns across a well-tended garden. In a matter of minutes, he can bike to town—where there are gourmet restaurants, an artfully programmed movie theater and several bookstores—or drive to breathtaking beaches, high-profile small museums and the homes of longtime friends.

Quick-witted, curious and loyal—he’s surrounded by people he’s known for decades—Fischl, who turns 60 this March, is also a hard worker. That’s how, over the course of three decades, he’s accumulated an imposing oeuvre—comprising critically acclaimed paintings, drawings, prints and sculpture of bad boys, bathers at the beach and bedroom trysts—as well as an exhibition track record that includes dozens of solo shows at museums and galleries, from Aspen and Berkeley to Wolfsburg and Zurich.

Since Labor Day, Fischl’s schedule has been chocka-block with appointments and activities. These include a variety of exhibitions. “Ten Breaths,” a complicated sculpture tableau involving 14 life-size figures, occupies two galleries at the Kestner-Gesellschaft, in Hannover, Germany, through February 3. In October, Thomas Gibson Fine Art, in London, hosted a 30-year retrospective of Fischl’s works on paper. That display overlapped with “All the More Real,” a survey of other artists’ work, tracing the human form from birth through old age, which Fischl co-curated to rave notices at the Parrish Art Museum, in Southampton, New York.

In between trips to Europe for his openings, Fischl discussed his own work in the sparsely furnished, 1,800-square-foot studio he had specially built and has occupied since 1999. Surrounded by several large, nearly completed paintings of crowded beach scenes, he said he didn’t know where or when he would show them. Sculpture was on his mind.

A big guy with a kindly demeanor, a thatch of gray hair, wire-rim spectacles, blue eyes and a winning smile, Fischl recounts how he began in the mid-1990s to make three-dimensional figures. He calls the story banal; others would term it serendipitous. “April and I were living out here in forced exile,” he says in his slow, even-toned voice. “Our place in New York was being renovated, and it caught fire.” Since it was the dead of winter in the Hamptons, the phone hardly rang and few visitors dropped by. In this quiet ambience, Fischl says, “I rediscovered play.” He was looking at photographs he’d taken of bathers in St.-Tropez during the 1980s and used so frequently for source material he felt the figures were his own personal repertory company. Out of the blue, he realized he was familiar with only the backs or the fronts of these scantily dressed characters. “I wondered,” he says, “what their other sides looked like.” So he got some clay and started to model miniature figures. He made one and then another. Within a few weeks, he had a beach scene on his worktable. That’s when it got really interesting. Fischl describes how he photographed his bather sculptures and then made paintings based on the prints. “It was,” he admits, “a wacky process.” Bright, colorful shots of seaside revelers in southern France metamorphosed into monochromatic sculptures executed in the bitter cold of the Hamptons. These were then photographed in black-and-white and subsequently transformed into paintings colored from the artist’s imagination.

At the time, Fischl could have been resting on his laurels. His paintings portraying mischievous adolescent behavior, such as Sleepwalker, 1979, and Best Western, 1983, had become instant American classics. His monotypes of bathers, in the buff and otherwise, as well as his prints for Peter Blum Edition, were being collected by major American museums. But although some art world observers consider the 1980s to be Fischl’s heyday, the artist himself has never looked back. Rather than repeat himself, he’s taken on new challenges that tellingly reveal how open-ended his artistic process is. He masterfully blends story and mood with free association, looking anywhere and everywhere for inspiration. After a trip to India, for instance, Fischl tweaked his palette and produced a group of saffron-tinged paintings that were exhibited in 1990 by his longtime dealer, Mary Boone. Six years later, a few months’ stay in Rome resulted in canvases that were filled with Baroque statues and church interiors. And what other avant-garde artist is talking about the things he learned from Auguste Rodin’s bronzes?