Set in Space

Collier Schorr and Nicole Eisenman seemingly resemble one another. The photographer and artist share dark eyebrows, short hair, and sloped shoulders from careers hunched over cameras and canvases. Both create revered scenes, too: Schorr with intimate photographic portraits and Eisenman with contemporary political paintings and sculptures. Their friendship goes back to fate: The pair met in 1987 at a lesbian bar in New York, decided they looked alike, and formed a lasting friendship leading to the creative union that inspired Cosmos, Schorr’s new book of drawings and photographs. It’s an artistic dance between the two that blurs the line between portraiture and self-portraiture.

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The drawings in Cosmos range from minimal to detailed, some in black-and-white and others in vibrant reds and sparse greens. Wrinkles and smile lines are rendered in graphite and infused with personality and history. While portraits are almost entirely of Eisenman, there are a few of Schorr herself: A self portrait posed next to artist Jordan Wolfson, a polaroid Chuck Close took of her, and even one of Eisennan’s smiling teenage daughter. The drawings are meditations, studies, confessions, and criticisms of the artists’ intermingling appearances and identities. “A drawing lends itself to androgyny because of everything that’s missing,” says Schorr, speaking with Eisenman at Karma Bookstore in the East Village for a Cosmos launch event last weekend. “There’s a question of whether the subject is male or female, which is a very lived experience.” Schorr’s shading and line work render her subjects less detailed than a photograph, yet each image pulses with a painterly freedom of ambiguity, and smudges and fingerprints infuse the artist’s own identity. “I return to drawing because it’s liberating,” she says.

In Nicole as Andy Warhol, 2022, Eisenman sits slightly slouched on an outlined couch after their top surgery procedure. The composition and pose references Alice Neel’s Andy Warhol, 1970, depicting the pop artist bare-chested and visibly scarred after getting shot two years before. It’s an incredibly vulnerable scene that Eisenman suggested Schorr recreate. The artist sits alluding to Warhol’s posture with ankles crossed, hands clasped in their lap, head slightly turned to look away, and bare chest exposed. “I want to give people an image of themselves that’s transcendent,” Shorr explains. Drawing becomes a tool to capture the balance between reality and fiction, and strength and weakness.

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Schorr is interested in replication, duality, and seeing a reflection of herself in an image of somebody else. In 2020 she began drawing photographs she had recently taken of Eisenman, which were then published in The New Yorker a year later. Typically, a photograph is collaborative: It belongs to both the taker and their subject, capturing a finite scene with a defined location and context. However, drawing allows the photographer the freedom to erase, accentuate, and ultimately reckon with her subject however she desires. “Your life project isn’t photography or drawing,” Eisenman tells Schorr. “It’s intimacy.” Cosmos is a conversation between artist and subject, where the two friends listen, shout, whisper, and talk over each other.

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‍Cosmos by Collier Schorr was published by MACK in October, 2024. Available now online and in stores.