Nicole Eisenman | Esther Hamerman: Life After Life

“My childhood home was a museum of my great-grandmother's paintings, they taught me how to look.” Nicole Eisenman grew up surrounded by the work of her “Mutti” Esther Hamerman. Now, Eisenman has partnered with the Frye to organize the first major survey devoted to the self-taught artist.

A Jewish refugee from Europe who fled Nazi persecution, Hamerman was in her sixties and living in New York City when she began to paint. The exhibition presents a near-complete overview of Hamerman’s known artistic output—intuitively composed images teeming with the details of life amidst the twentieth century’s upheavals.

Her work is joined by a selection of Eisenman’s own compositions of the last twenty years: distinctive portrayals of people and places that render a searing verdict on our contemporary moment. Less a story of direct artistic influence than of emotional kinship, Life After Life brings two generations into conversation through their representations of memory, community, and the places where collective life unfolds.