Jewellery Tree

By Nicole Eisenman

Jewellery Tree (2021) by Nicole EisenmanMayor of London

Making the Private... Public

Contemporary artist Nicole Eisenman’s Jewellery Tree is taken out of the domestic setting into a very public one. Hanging from the tree are the accumulated trinketry and mementos you might find on top of a dressing table: some superfluous and wasteful, others meaningful and precious. 

Jewellery Tree (2021) by Nicole EisenmanMayor of London

A Representation of the Human Experience

Included are the medals of Lord Nelson, the pipes and pokers of Bloody Sunday protesters, plastic coffee lids, a crushed can of beer and symbols of philosophies that have come in and out of fashion over the years. Some are specific to Trafalgar Square and its history and others more to the general human experience.

Still Life with a Faience Figure (1880) by Pierre-Auguste RenoirMayor of London

The Artist's Style

Nicole’s works are inspired by gay culture, the French Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Austrian Maria Lassnig - the first female artist to win the Grand Austrian State Prize in 1988. 

One of Nicole’s best-known works is Another Green World which is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and is sold in the gift shop in the form of a jigsaw puzzle. 

Nicole Eisenman Portrait by Nathan PerkelMayor of London

About The Artist

Nicole was born in Verdun, France in 1965 where her father was stationed as an army psychiatrist; she grew up in New York with her parents and two brothers and studied art at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 1987.

Her many awards and accolades include the Guggenheim Fellowship (1996), The Carnegie Prize (2013), the MacArthur Fellowship ‘Genius Grant’ (2015) and induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2018. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and has two children.

Credits: Story

L Rhoda Molife

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