Place of birth: New York, USA
Eric Fischl has become the painter laureate of American anxiety in the eighties. From the moment that he exhibited "Sleepwalker", 1979, his image of a teenage boy resentfully jerking off in a suburban wading pool, Fischl has zeroed in on the discontents of the White Tribe whose territory stretches from Scarsdale to Anaheim: unreachable kids, grotesque parents, small convulsions of voyeurism and barely concealed incestuous longing. When Fischl started out to paint, the odds were against the very idea of narrative painting based on the human figure. Born in New York City in 1948, he went to art school in 1970 at the California Institute for the Arts in Los Angeles just at the height of the belief, then endemic in the American art world, that Painting was Dead. Art education that has repealed its own standards can destroy a tradition by not teaching its skills, and that was what happened to figure painting in the United States between 1960 and 1980.
