PHOENIX, AZ.- This fall, Phoenix Art Museum 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.