Eric fischl vgallery series#

It’s a town that envelops, a sort of embrace. COVID was the ultimate acceleration of all of this, but it started before that.ĮF: What’s different about Sag Harbor from the other Hamptons is that it is a town that you don’t drive through. So, you are ending up with the appearance of something that no longer embodies the character of that thing. Sag Harbor is being transformed by its popularity, by its beauty, by its charm. This is tragic because the character of the town, historically, has been far more compelling and far more rooted in the values that we inherited as kids and, you know, were brought up to believe in, in terms of what America could be, what a community could be, what neighbors are. Sag Harbor is being transformed into an uber-bourgeois, gentrified resort town. Can we unpack that?ĮF: This is the first show I’ve done where I’m specifically referencing the place where I live. We regressed into smaller and smaller groups of like-minded people as protection, as a way of trying to hold on to something that didn’t make us feel as insecure, but that brought out the anger, brought up the fear.ĪN: The title of this exhibition is Towards the End of an Astonishing Beauty: An Elegy to Sag Harbor, and Thus America.

Anyway, all of that is spiraling out the myth of America.

That we didn’t have a superior that would stop something from happening long before it happened.ĪN: And now classified documents are flapping in the breeze.ĮF: Yeah. That we were vulnerable on our home territory. All the things that we believed in about America were instantly revealed as not true: That we were not universally loved. I think the first thing that set us on this path was 911. That, or the end is incredibly frightening. People who have placed a lot of belief in and have a need for certain values, and objects that represent those values, at a time when those objects aren’t holding to those values.ĪN: Did the Trump years just expose that fact?ĮF: The Trump thing is hopefully the end. As it manifests within the strata of America I’m most familiar with, which is a basically white, educated, upper middle class.

Eric fischl vgallery series#

At the conclusion of his review of that show in Art in America, Jackson Arn wrote, “I’m looking forward to late America three in 2024.” Is this late America three?Įric Fischl: I’ve been making dark paintings on the theme of America for a while.ĪN: Yes, starting in 2016 when Trump was elected, the painting of the boy curled up, wrapped in an American flag…ĮF: This new series is, in a personal way, marking the decline of America.ĮF: Yes.

The work leans heavily on the idyllic Hamptons town of Sag Harbor, where Fischl has lived for decades, as a backdrop for a grotesque and sympathetic parade of American every-men and -women.ĪRTnews met with Fischl at Skarstedt to talk through the new work.ĪRTnews: These paintings might be even darker than the last ones you showed here, two years ago.

With this year’s midterm elections looming in November, Fischl unveiled his latest series, Towards the End of an Astonishing Beauty: An Elegy to Sag Harbor, and Thus America, last week at Skarstedt Gallery. New Church Residency Conceived by Artists Eric Fischl and April Gornik Names First Directorĭuring the fall of 2020, after six months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Fischl showed a series called, “Meditations on Melancholia,” more flag-wrapped figures, and a hula-hooping nude.