Nicole Eisenman's New Exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Somerset Explores Boredom and Gender Fluidity

Nicole Eisenman's exhibition 'Where I Was, It Shall Be' presents new works at Hauser & Wirth Somerset through 10 January. The artist discusses how pandemic isolation influenced her practice, noting waves of disbelief and depression while maintaining her studio routine in Brooklyn. Her 2019 Whitney Biennial installation featured monumental figures on a rooftop terrace, aiming to recreate protest energy with a fog machine adding humor. Eisenman's 1995 Whitney Biennial breakout work depicted an apocalyptic bombed-out museum, eerily foreshadowing later controversies that led to Warren Kanders' resignation. She received a MacArthur 'Genius Grant' in 2015 for restoring cultural significance to human representation. Recent sculptures include 'Sketch for a Fountain', installed permanently in Dallas and Boston after being vandalized in Münster. Eisenman identifies as genderfluid and co-founded the curatorial collective Ridykeulous with Al Steiner to demarginalize queer and feminist art. Her current works experiment with paper pulp, creating posters with slogans like 'INCELESBIAN' that will appear alongside scaled-down processional figures in Somerset.