LEARN // 2025 Eric Fischl Lecture Series: Eric Fischl
April 2 | Conversation with Eric Fischl @ 7:30 pm
Awards and lecture presented in Whiteman Hall. Limited capacity.
TICKETS: Free for Members and MCCCD students | $5 for the general public
Celebrating 20 years of hosting The Eric Fischl Series, The 2025 Eric Fischl Lecture features Eric Fischl himself, renowned contemporary painter, sculptor, author and Phoenix College alumnus.
Hear from Fischl in conversation with Eleanor Nairne, the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art, who will discuss the artist’s new work including Bathers, a series of large-scale hand painted bronze sculpture derived from virtual reality paintings.
About Eric Fischl
Born in New York City in 1948, Eric Fischl grew up in the suburbs of Long Island. He began his art education in Phoenix where his parents had moved in 1967. He attended Phoenix College and earned his B.F.A. from the California Institute for the Arts in 1972. After spending time in Chicago where he worked as a guard at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Fischl moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia to teach painting at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Fischl had his first solo exhibition, curated by Bruce W. Ferguson, at Dalhousie Art Gallery in Nova Scotia in 1975 before relocating to New York City in 1978. Fischl's suburban upbringing provided him with a backdrop of alcoholism and a country club culture obsessed with image over content. His early work thus became focused on the rift between what was experienced and what could not be said. His first New York City solo exhibition was at Edward Thorp Gallery in 1979, during a time when suburbia was not considered a legitimate genre for art. He first received critical attention for depicting the dark, disturbing undercurrents of mainstream American life.
An internationally acclaimed American painter and sculptor, Fischl’s artwork is represented in many distinguished museums across the world and has been featured in over one thousand publications. His extraordinary achievements throughout his career have made him one of the most influential figurative painters of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He is a Fellow at both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Science. He lives and works in Sag Harbor, New York with his wife and painter April Gornik.
About Eleanor Nairne
Eleanor Nairne is the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Nairne previously served as the Senior Curator at Barbican Art Gallery in London, where she curated many of the gallery’s best-attended and most critically acclaimed exhibitions including Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle (2023), Soheila Sokhanvari: Rebel Rebel (2022), Lee Krasner: Living Colour (2019), and Basquiat: Boom for Real (2017).
Before joining Barbican, Nairne was the curator of the Artangel Collection at Tate, where she organized more than 30 exhibitions and installations across the UK. In 2021, she was the guest curator for Eva Hesse / Hannah Wilke: Erotic Abstraction (2021) at Acquavella Galleries in New York and edited the accompanying publication. This exhibition was the first to pair the pioneering work of the two feminist post-minimalist sculptors, Eva Hesse and Hannah Wilke, and was selected by Frieze as one of the top 10 US exhibitions of 2021. Nairne received an MA in History of Art from Courtauld Institute of Art in 2010 and earned a BA in Modern History from Oxford University in 2008. She is a regular contributor to The London Review of Books, The New York Times and other publications.