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"Try to conjure a pantheon of great painters from the 16th through the 21st centuries — the likes of Brueghel, Rubens, Renoir, Munch, Beckmann and Pollock — channeled through the sensibility of a contemporary artist with a diabolical sense of humor, a darkly critical take on culture and society, an eclectic appetite for influences from everywhere and extraordinary painterly skills, and you’d still never imagine the paintings in Nicole Eisenman/MATRIX 248 at the Berkeley Art Museum. [...]
“The Triumph of Poverty,” 2009 (above), depicts a weird exodus of distressed-looking families on foot and in a tattered red U.S.-made automobile, apparently abandoning their homesteads and heading toward parts unknown. They are led, literally ass-forwards, by a grim-faced tuxedoed plutocrat who’s dropped his trousers but not yet lost his shirt. Eisenman based this composition on an allegorical painting of the same title (c. 1533), by Hans Holbein the Younger. The band of miniature figures tethered to a leash the dilapidated capitalist holds comes from “The Blind Leading the Blind” (1568), a painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder based on the Biblical allegory of sightless men tumbling into a ditch.
Nicole Eisenman / MATRIX 248 runs through July 14 at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, 2626 Bancroft Way, Berkeley 94720.
http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/
