ERIC FISCHL: A DAY AT THE BEACH

Eric Fischl is an internationally acclaimed American painter and sculptor. His artwork is represented in many distinguished museums throughout 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.

Fischl was born in 1948 in New York City and grew up in the suburbs of Long Island. He began his art education in Phoenix, Arizona 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. He then spent some time in Chicago, where he worked as a guard at the Museum of Contemporary Art. In 1974, he moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to teach painting at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Fischl had his first solo show, curated by Bruce W. Ferguson, at Dalhousie Art Gallery in Nova Scotia in 1975 before relocating to New York City with his future wife, April Gornik, in 1978.

Fischl's suburban upbringing painfully provided him with the complex themes enmeshed in a world of segregated privilege, alcoholism, narcissism, dysfunction, madness and 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 show 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 upper-middleclass American life.

Fischl's paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints have been the subject of numerous solo and major group exhibitions and his work is represented in many museums, as well as prestigious private and corporate collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modem Art in New York City, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, St. Louis Art Museum, Louisiana Museum of Art in Denmark, MusÈe Beaubourg in Paris, to name a few.

Throughout his artistic life, Fischl has had the good fortune to collaborate on various book projects with E.L. Doctorow, Allen Ginsberg, Jamaica Kincaid, Jerry Saltz and Frederic Tuten. He co-authored with Michael Stone, a memoir titled Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas that was published in 2013.

Among his passion for art education and community building through creativity, he has created scholarships and internships for young artists and art students.

In 2021, along with his wife April, he co-founded The Church, a community art center and artist residency in Sag Harbor. To date, it is their most ambitious project and one they are most proud of.

Opening at the Phoenix Art Museum in November 2025, there will be a survey of Fischl’s  50 year art career.

Eric Fischl is a Fellow at both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Science, and is the president of Guild Hall's Academy of the Arts. He lives and works in Sag Harbor, NY with his wife, the painter April Gornik.

ericfischl.com