To put a painting by Nicole Eisenman – the subject of a survey at Whitechapel Gallery this October – on the cover of frieze is to ask you to stop. All works of art lay claim to our attention but, by some quasi-magical formula of colour and shape, a painting by Eisenman asks you to take a beat. I’ve done it plenty of times. A face, a scenario, a landscape, filled with recognizable elements that have been exaggerated, diminished, smothered in colour. ‘Effortlessly referential,’ Isabel Waidner says of Eisenman’s work, in a feature on how the artist responds to literature. I take Waidner’s description to mean two things: there are aspects of Eisenman’s paintings that we recognize from other works of art, and there are aspects we recognize from our own lives. I don’t mean the latter quite so literally; it’s far dreamier – you simply feel, with a painting by Eisenman, that you’ve ‘been there’.

We like to pretend that art is part of our lives, in some direct way, but it rarely is. All sorts of interventions – geographic distance, gobs of money – keep it at a remove. One through-line for this issue is how art really does become part of lived experience. For instance, Marko Gluhaich profiles Rirkrit Tiravanija – one of the ultimate artists of presence – ahead of his retrospective at MoMA PS1, New York. Five writers pen homages to the work of Sarah Lucas, especially the ways in which her familiar, impoverished materials seem to come so directly from (our) crummy metropolitan life. And a series of columns focuses on how family ties inform our creativity: Igshaan Adams speaks about inherited craftsmanship, Katherine Hubbard about caring for (and creating with) her mother, poets Jorie Graham and Geoffrey G. O’Brien ask what it means to raise kids when the world is burning down.

Eisenman once said that ‘at this intensely worrisome moment’ (of climate change and right-wing populism), ‘I’m painting examples of what, to me, looks like goodness in the world.’ Maybe that’s why we stop – she offers us a glimpse of something rare.
Andrew Durbin
Editor-in-Chief, frieze