Growing Up in the Company of Woman Ⅰ 女の中で育ってⅠ

Presented here is a view of a comfortable middle-class residence typical in the suburbs of large cities in America. On the backyard lawn, a boy and a woman who looks like to be his mother are playing catch without clothes. Does the title suggest an Oedipal relationship between the son and the mother in a household lacking a father? The house, painted half light and half dark, seems to symbolize such a situation. The composition made of three canvases, respectively featuring the boy, the mother, and the house at the center and connected sideways with a little slip at each junction, gives the picture a dramatic spatial expansion and a sense of flowing time, turning it into something like a scene from a movie. Fischl painted in abstract early in his career, but turned to figurative representation in the mid 1970s, establishing his mature style with his "Sleepwalker" of 1979. Most of his later works takes up scenes from the hedonistic lifestyle of the upper middle class, and deals with sexual conflicts and emotional problems people must face in living in a family and a society. A figure representing the 1980s' reintroduction of human figures into painting, he is highly respected as a painter who portrays with almost painful honesty the psychological climate of today's American society.