For Immediate Release
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Samantha Santos
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Opening November 2025, Eric Fischl: Stories Told brings together artist’s signature large-scale paintings that explore myths of middle-class suburban America
PHOENIX (April 23, 2025) – This fall, Phoenix Art Museum (PhxArt) presents Eric Fischl: Stories Told, organized by PhxArt and guest curated by Heather Sealy Lineberry, Curator Emeritus at the Arizona State University Art Museum. The major exhibition explores several notable series created by the figurative painter from the late 1970s to today, foregrounding his career-long commitment to depicting the human figure amid middle-class suburban settings inspired by his childhood and personal experiences. Eric Fischl: Stories Told will be on view at PhxArt from November 7, 2025 – June 14, 2026.
“Phoenix Art Museum is honored to premiere Eric Fischl: Stories Told in the very city where Fischl began his artistic career,” said Jeremy Mikolajczak, the Museum’s Sybil Harrington Director and CEO. “For decades, Eric Fischl’s painting, drawing, and sculptural practice have garnered tremendous art-world acclaim, especially from artists with a particular interest in the human figure. In addition to his international stature, Fischl has had a profound impact on the Phoenix arts scene through longtime mentorship and philanthropic endeavors at Phoenix College, making this survey of signature works—the first full-scale, solo exhibition of Fischl’s art since 2018—a homecoming of sorts.”
Fischl (b. 1948) grew up in Long Island, New York, and Phoenix, Arizona, where he attended Phoenix College and Arizona State University in the late 1960s. After studying under contemporary landscape painter Merrill Mahaffey, Fischl received his B.F.A. in 1972 as part of the first graduating class at the California Institute for the Arts (CalArts). During a time when new art forms and ideas reigned at CalArts, Fischl largely had to teach himself to paint in the traditional manner, studying early modern artists like Manet and Degas. Working with figurative painting and narrative content in the late 1970s, when it was decidedly out of favor in the art world, Fischl made his subject what he knew best: memories of suburban life and the nuclear family of his childhood. Across his oeuvre, Fischl has explored themes such as the aspirational American Dream of the 1950s, the radical social and aesthetic shifts of the 1960s and 1970s, and the heady culture of New York City and its defining art movements of the 1980s. Throughout his long career, Fischl has consistently centered the human figure in his work, placing it in fraught, ambiguous moments where social taboos, anxieties, family secrets, masculinity, unacknowledged privilege, the collision of the public and the private, and more bubble just below the surface.
Eric Fischl: Stories Told brings together approximately 40 large-scale works that prominently display Fischl’s astounding consistency in and commitment to painting the human form within the context of middle-class America. Organized into four thematic sections, the exhibition showcases Fischl’s well-known early paintings and works on paper in conversation with paintings from series created later in Fischl’s career, including Late America, My Old Neighborhood, Presence of an Absence, Complications from an Already Unfulfilled Life, Melancholia, and Hotel Stories. The sections are defined by their key compositional element—the human body—depicted alone, in a couple, as part of a family, or in a crowd. This straightforward approach underlines Fischl’s constant consideration of the relationship between individual and collective identities, and highlights recurring themes throughout his career.
“For more than 45 years, Eric Fischl has used figurative painting to examine the defining social issues and current events of our time,” said Heather Sealy Lineberry, the exhibition’s curator. “Eric Fischl: Stories Told is a timely opportunity to recontextualize the artist’s work within our contemporary moment as figure painting experiences an international resurgence and as Fischl continues to examine the possibilities and promises, the disparities and contradictions of the American experience.”
Eric Fischl: Stories Told is accompanied by a fully illustrated, 160-page catalogue published by Scala Arts Publishers, Inc., with an introduction by curator Heather Sealy Lineberry and essays by art historian Dr. Kathryn Brown; art critic and curator Eleanor Heartney; and Eleanor Nairne, the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and Department Head, Modern and Contemporary at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The publication also features a conversation between Eric Fischl and artist Arcmanoro Niles, as well as an annotated chronology of Fischl’s life and career.
High-resolution photography for Eric Fischl: Stories Told can be downloaded here. To request interviews, contact the Communications Office of Phoenix Art Museum at 602.257.2117 or [email protected].
About the Exhibition
Eric Fischl: Stories Told is organized by Phoenix Art Museum and guest curated by Heather Sealy Lineberry, Curator Emeritus at the Arizona State University Art Museum, faculty associate in the ASU School of Art’s Museum Studies program. The exhibition is made possible by Men’s Arts Council, Margaret T. Morris Foundation, Steven Martin and Anne Stringfield, James and Janet Dicke, Bruce and Suzie Kovner, and DL Winters Foundation, with additional support provided by Rafael Jablonka.
All exhibitions at Phoenix Art Museum are underwritten by the Phoenix Art Museum Exhibition Excellence Fund, founded by The Opatrny Family Foundation with additional major support provided by Joan Cremin.
Admission is free for Museum Members; youth aged 5 and younger; and Maricopa County Community Colleges students. Entrance into the exhibition is included in general admission for the public. Visitors may also enjoy reduced admission to the exhibition during voluntary-donation times on Wednesdays from 3 – 8 pm, made possible by SRP and City of Phoenix, and First Fridays from 5 – 8 pm, made possible by APS and Lexus. For a full breakdown of general admission prices and hours, see phxart.org/visit/.
About Phoenix Art Museum
Since 1959, Phoenix Art Museum (PhxArt) has engaged millions of visitors with the art of our region and world. Located in Phoenix’s Central Corridor, PhxArt creates spaces of exchange and belonging for all audiences through dynamic exhibitions, collections, and experiences with art. Each year, 300,000 guests on average engage with critically acclaimed national and international exhibitions and the Museum’s collection of more than 21,000 works of American and Western American, Asian, European, Latin American, modern, and contemporary art and fashion design, along with vibrant photography exhibitions made possible through the Museum’s landmark partnership with the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson. PhxArt also presents live performances, outstanding examples of global cinema, arts-education programs and workshops, an art+music festival, and more for the community. To learn more about Phoenix Art Museum, visit phxart.org, or call 602.257.1880.
About Eric Fischl
Eric 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 Arizona State University before earning 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 in 1978.
Fischl’s suburban upbringing provided him with a backdrop of alcoholism and a 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 mainstream 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, The Paine Weber Collection, and many others. Fischl has collaborated with other artists and authors, including E.L. Doctorow, Allen Ginsberg, Jamaica Kincaid, Jerry Saltz and Frederic Tuten. He is also the founder, President, and lead curator for America: Now and Here, an project that launched in 2011 and featured 150 of some of America’s most celebrated visual artists, musicians, poets, playwrights, and filmmakers.
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