Eric Fischl: The Krefeld-Project

by Robert Rosenblum, Eric Fischl (Artist), Martin Hentschel (Editor)

In the spring of 2002, artist Eric Fischl, best known for his Neo-Expressionist paintings of the 1980s, organized a three-day photo session at the Haus Esters, in the Krefelder Kunstmuseen, Germany. For the project, the house was temporarily furnished with modern domestic necessities and "inhabited" by two actors, an attractive middle-aged man and woman. Photographs of everyday scenes have long been a component of Fischl's repertoire, but here he took pictures of a disruptive mixture of fact and actors, playing normal people, in an artificial domestic surrounding. From the approximately 2,000 photographs that the artist shot, he carefully chose a selection to be used as sketches for twelve large-scale paintings. The capture ambiguous, intimate, and strangely uncanny moments in the bedroom, the living room, the bathroom, the sunroom, and the dining room. It is these new works that appear here, embodying an essential expansion and synthesis of Fischl's previous work.

80 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Robert Rosenblum was a curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and a professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He is the author of multiple volumes on modern and contemporary art, including The Paintings of August Strindberg and Paintings in the Musee d'Orsay. Rosenblum is the recipient of a Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism.