Untitled (Seated female figure)

Fischl completed this oil painting on paper in 1986, the height of the Neo-expressionist movement in the United States. Neo-expressionism was a short-lived international movement that rejected the intellectual distance and formalism of Minimalism and Conceptual art in favor of painterly expressiveness and raw feeling, while emphasizing figurative and narrative themes. The work features a woman casually posed in an interior, apparently seated on a toilet. The painting exemplifies Fischl’s penchant for introducing disconcerting or highly intimate themes into his work. As here, his models are anonymous, and exist in anonymous settings. And yet there is always an inkling of an implied narrative, a hidden story, perhaps not always innocent, which is left to the imagination of the viewer.