Eric Fischl

American, b. 1948

Study: Boys at Bat II, 1980

watercolour on tissue paper

90.1 x 73.2 cm Image: 35.1 x 49.8 cm

Collection of the Winnipeg Art Gallery; Acquired with the Shell Canada Limited fund for Canadian drawings

G-83-1

Categories:

Painting, Works on Paper

One of the leading figurative painters in America, Eric Fischl gained cricital attention in the early 1980s for referencing adolecent fantasies in his studies of middle-class suburban residents engaged in various daily activities. Up until this time the controversial subject mix had not been dealt with in such an overt way in contemporary art. Fischl made it his own, mining the fixation of the exterior appearance which held the dysfunctional family dynamic together. The WAG study is for the second version of the painting. In the earlier version, Boy at Bat (1979), a boy wearing a baseball uniform and holding a bat stands next to a man swinging a baseball bat.