Phoenix Art Museum presents forty paintings by Eric Fischl, a New Yorker who seems magnetically drawn to the Valley of the Sun—in all its joy and strangeness.
Eric Fischl: Stories Told
November 7–June 14, 2026
Phoenix Art Museum
“The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths,” reads text in Eric Fischl’s painting Dining Room, Scene #2 (2003), on view at Phoenix Art Museum.
This exhibition, curated by Heather Sealy Lineberry, features forty large-scale paintings spanning the past fifty years, which focus on peeling back the suburban American Dream façade. Fischl’s visceral canvases reveal scenes of raw intimacy, violence, and modern disillusionment, but also community and grace.
“There are moments when the body becomes awkward and difficult and betrays your inner life,” says Fischl, who was born in 1948 in Long Island, New York, and moved to Phoenix in 1967, where he attended Phoenix College and Arizona State University. Fischl relocated back to New York in 1978, yet Phoenix continues to pull him back, with his father’s death in the city in 1996 inspiring works like the painting Once Where We Looked to Put Down Our Dead (1996).
There are moments when the body becomes awkward and difficult and betrays your inner life.
Despite spending significant time in the desert, turbulent and mysterious waters recur throughout Fischl’s oeuvre: from the chlorinated shallows of suburban swimming pools to tempestuous ocean waves and the bruised, moody skies of monsoon season in Phoenix.
Fischl poses people in and around these aquatic scenes, catching them in personal moments. A middle-aged man walks along a stormy beach, his fragility highlighted by the forbidding landscape. A young boy gleefully spits fire from his mouth at a barbecue, while two bare-breasted figures cavort in the pool behind him. A white figure lies in an awkward huddle by a manicured pool, while brown-skinned gardeners tend the bushes in the background, uncomfortably focusing a lens on privilege and social brutality.
Other subjects include lovers and nudes, personal grief and private rooms. A 2023 self-portrait of Fischl in his studio is full of kinetic energy, showing an artist engaged in a messy yet intentional process.
Made from the late 1970s to today, these works are alluring, disturbing, and complex. Eric Fischl: Stories Told is a testament to the anxieties, secret desires, traumas, and grit of modern life in America, and what it means to be chaotically, beautifully human.
