In another, a house-shaped tea ball dreams (in a cartoon balloon) of its own front lawn. In one gouache, a young girl (reminiscent of the Morton’s Salt girl) lifts her skirt to pee her loyal dog laps up the puddle happily. The subjects-nutty, sweet, wickedly funny-are playful restagings of pop icons, replete with ragged undertones of sex and aggression. Other, smaller works on paper are loosely gestural in style, closer to caricature or cartoon. In Trash’s Dance, 1992, for example, a performer poses aggressively on the stage of a rough-and-tumble lesbian bar, in a scene that recalls some of Reginald Marsh’s bawdier works. As in the murals, the weighty figures sprawl and pulsate, modeled with ink washes that evoke old-fashioned magazine illustration despite the murky palette, a pop sensibility persists in the cartoony line, underground content, and ribald humor.
In Captured Pirates on the Island of Lesbos, 1992, a gleeful horde of brawny women enact a ritual of mass castration. But Eisenman has also made a series of expansively detailed ink drawings that replay her handling of the figure on a more contained scale. However densely worked, however large in scale, Eisenman’s murals are ephemeral: Minotaur Hunt, and a linked scene titled Penelope in the Pit, were temporary affairs, to be painted over for the gallery’s next show.
