Eric Fischl

Known for: figurative narrative painting of American suburban life

Eric Fischl emerged in the early 1980s as the central figure of a return to figurative narrative painting in New York, producing large canvases of suburban American life — backyard parties, beach scenes, bedrooms — in which the formal conventions of bourgeois realism contain scenes of barely suppressed psychological and sexual tension. His Sleepwalker (1979), depicting a naked boy in a wading pool, generated controversy when it was shown. He has also worked extensively as a sculptor.