George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Fischl Paints Art Fairs With Oils and Acid" @wsj by ANNA RUSSELL
'Art Fair: Booth #1 Oldenberg's Sneakers' by Eric Fischl Eric Fischl/Mary Boone Gallery, New York
For some, contemporary art fairs are places to see and be seen. For New York-based artist Eric Fischl, they're more like a series of bad dates. "It's like speed dating," he said. "People try to make instantaneous assessments."
Mr. Fischl, whose large-scale figurative paintings have long been fixtures on the contemporary art-fair circuit, has spent his four-decade career in the art world hiding out from such places. Nevertheless, in 2012, he picked up his camera and headed to Art Basel Miami Beach.
The resulting series, "Art Fair Paintings," will be on view at London's Victoria Miro Gallery from Oct. 14. The pictures offer sharp, often humorous takes on the contemporary art world. At age 66, Mr. Fischl casts a wry eye over the oddballs and sophisticates that wander the galleries in his dozen or so new works. "I finally decided to face the reality, which is that this is my milieu," he said.
Known for erotically charged suburban scenes, Mr. Fischl gained recognition in the 1980s with works like "Bad Boy," which depicts a young boy standing before a naked woman (his memoir from last year carries the same name). More recently, he has painted portraits of friends E.L. Doctorow and Steve Martin, sprawling beach scenes and large group portraits.
At auction, his works have sold in the high six figures or above (he set a personal record with his painting "Daddy's Girl," which sold for $1.9 million at Christie's in 2006). But at his home in bucolic Sag Harbor, where he lives full-time with his wife, the painter April Gornik, Mr. Fischl said he still feels like an outsider in the art world. He dislikes the crowds and the lack of space for quiet contemplation at art fairs. "It's so anti-art, it's a nightmare," he said.
"We don't have a lot of great places to go look at art," he said. "It seems like everything has to be shared by a crunch of people and a pressure to hurry up and get it."
Mr. Fischl went to Art Basel Miami Beach in search of "characters," he said. At the fair, he wandered the booths snapping pictures of interesting people. He photographed a woman in a flowing red dress and a man in dark sunglasses with his arms folded. He later visited Art Southampton, Frieze Art Fair New York, and gallery openings for additional material. At his studio, he used Photoshop to cut and paste the images into collages he found dynamic or compelling. These compositions became the basis for the large-scale canvases.
Eric Fischl, 'Art Fair: Booth #4 The Price' Eric Fischl/Mary Boone Gallery, New York
In one, "Art Fair: Booth #4 The Price," fashionably clad men and women mill about chatting or tapping their phones distractedly. Behind them, an enormous portrait of a naked woman by Joan Semmel goes nearly unnoticed. "They're texting, they're photographing, somehow they're mediating their moment," said Mr. Fischl. The title is a play on the Ken Price sculpture in the center of the group.
Mr. Fischl finds humor in the works but also said they're about "artists' intentions, artists' desires to connect, and how short that will fall." Art fairs create "a tension that I like as a dramatic moment," he said, "everybody at cross-purposes."
Painting the fairs has also been a technical challenge for the artist. The white-cube architecture of the booths presents new spatial problems, and trying to recreate the artwork on display—like the dusty orange and blue lips of an Andy Warhol "Mao" portrait in "Art Fair: Booth #16 Sexual Politics"—has expanded his color range beyond his usual palette.
One woman he followed through several display areas at Art Basel Miami was photography student Mariel Lebrija. On the day he photographed her, she wore a flat-brimmed hat and funky shoes and stopped to look closely at many of the works. Ms. Lebrija, 24, was surprised to see herself in one of Mr. Fischl's paintings over a year later at Frieze New York this past May, where a few of the paintings from the series were exhibited. "The first thing I recognized was my clothes," she said. "It was really funny."
The artist's longtime dealer Mary Boone, of New York's Mary Boone Gallery, said she sees echoes of his earlier work in the social commentary the new series offers—though this time it's directed at the art world. "He's pointing out there's a certain vanity to it," she said.
The timing of Mr. Fischl's show offers an added wink: it opens just before Frieze London. "People can go to the art fair and then they can come to my show and see what they look like," he said.