It is the province of art to contain multitudes that need not (thank god) look precisely like the real world, whatever that is. At Sadie Coles HQ, ten new works (all 2026) by the French-born U.S. artist Nicole Eisenman are most prodigiously united by their incredible variety in form and subject, her singular painterly attention to surface and texture, and a compositional awareness of how many universes (spaces, lives, sensibilities, dimensions) one canvas can hold.
There is the time of the world and there is the time of painting and, in spite of the static seeming nature of oil and pigment on canvas, neither is entirely fixed. For instance: a large work that unfolds over multiple canvases may show a phalanx of bodies writhing and roiling in shared bliss – a toe here, a rounded knee there, a pair of legs spread here, a hand reaching in between there. Or: each canvas might be a freeze-frame, like animated cells, and maybe it is only two bodies folding and unfolding, left to right, but we apprehend each moment at once, which is how ecstasy feels in any case.