# Nicole Eisenman What Happened

URL: https://vielmetter.com/exhibitions/nicole-eisenman-what-happened-whitechapel-gallery-london/
October 11, 2023 — January 14, 2024 · Whitechapel Gallery, London · Artists: Nicole Eisenman

The first major UK retrospective of the artist Nicole Eisenman opens at Whitechapel Gallery in London on October 11!

*Nicole Eisenman: What Happened*brings together over 100 works from across the artist’s three-decade career. The exhibition showcases the extraordinary range and formal inventiveness that characterizes their practice and includes large-scale, monumental paintings alongside sculptures, monoprints, animation, and drawings. Illuminating the irreverent and humorous approach that Eisenman uses to explore pressing socio-political issues, the exhibition explores gender, identity, and sexual politics; civic and governmental turmoil; and protest and activism. Fusing lowbrow humor with political engagement, they combine satire and anxiety to explore the individual and collective pathos of the human condition.

A major sculpture in Eisenman’s career, the iconic *Perpetual Motion Machine* bronze figure is part of an installation collectively titled *Procession*. An uncanny monument to the precarious experience of life in the 21st-century, the deftly rendered figure of *Perpetual Motion Machine*—consisting of a larger-than-life figure perpetually moving a paint stick from which bronze tuna cans hang from a gently swaying pole—alludes to the perpetual labor of an artist. The distinctly humanist focus of *Procession* has roots in Eisenman’s allegorical painting practice.

Nicole Eisenman: What Happened*is organized by Museum Brandhorst, Munich, Germany, and Whitechapel Gallery, and is curated by Mark Godfrey and Monika Bayer-Wermuth, with the support of Lydia Yee and Cam**eron Foote at Whitechapel Gallery.*

More information at [https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/nicole-eisenman-what-happened/](https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/nicole-eisenman-what-happened/)