Fischl, Eric (1948- ), American painter of disturbing, dreamlike narratives in a loose, realist style. Fischl was born in New York City and grew up in Port Washington on Long Island, New York. He studied briefly at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, and in 1970 he joined the first entering class at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, along with David Salle and Ross Bleckner, who would later also become well-known artists.

Fischl began as an abstract painter, but between 1974 and 1978, while teaching at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada, he started creating figurative works. By the time he moved back to New York City in 1978, Fischl had developed a distinctive style, as exemplified by Sleepwalker (1979, Thomas Ammann Collection, Zürich, Switzerland) in which a young, naked adolescent boy is shown urinating into an inflatable pool in the middle of the night.

In the early 1980s art prices had increased to an all-time high, and artists were receiving unprecedented levels of media attention. A movement known as neoexpressionism had pushed figurative painting into the spotlight and Fischl's work arrived in a climate ripe for acceptance.

Some of Fischl's early works, featuring coming-of-age themes, outraged audiences. In Bad Boy (1981, Saatchi Collection, London, England) for instance, an adolescent boy stands before a naked adult woman lying on a bed with her legs spread. It is afternoon, and sunlight filtering through venetian blinds stripes the shadowy bedroom. Some of Fischl's works draw on his own early memories.

His mother, an alcoholic, died in a car crash in 1970, and Fischl alludes to this event in A Woman Possessed (1981, private collection), which depicts a woman passed out on the ground near a car. The addition of dogs sniffing her body is purely fantasy, however, and makes the scene more mysterious and threatening. Fischl's work of the 1990s includes exotic scenes set in foreign lands, but it continues to express social and emotional awkwardness in a somewhat clumsy but realistic style.