Artists

Louis Eisner

Press release

Bernheim Gallery, Zurich, is pleased to present Puzzled Panther, a solo exhibition of New York-based artist Louis Eisner. The exhibition comprises eight new paintings; three medium and large-scale canvases and five intimate works on copper plate from his new series, united not by subject but by atmosphere. The exhibition takes its title from the central canvas: a portrait of the artist's brother, stretched across a sofa. Puzzled Panther is domestic in its staging and unsettling in its effect, a painting that watches the viewer as much as it is watched. It is the emotional pivot of the show, characteristic of Eisner's method, the subject is somehow related to him, to his personal taste and interests or to his life, but this attachment does not resolve the looking into comfort. The puzzle remains. Just in the same way as André Malraux went on to create the "Musée Imaginaire", to put together all the images of art that have shaped our thoughts, to describe the impossibility to see an image in a book, an artwork in a museum without recalling all the other works of art seen or experienced, Eisner puts the viewer in the middle of his imaginary museum. The eight paintings in Puzzled Panther are, at their most literal, images of a green room, a brother, a landscape, some fruit, a girl with a book, a man taken down from a cross, a naked lady. At their most expansive, they are an account of what it means to live among images; to be shaped by the reproductions one grows up with as surely as by the people, to find in the touch of ink on paper or the skew of a printer head some correspondence with the elusive, indefinable moment of the experience of being.