Raucous, expressive and laugh-out-loud funny: Nicole Eisenman, at the Whitechapel Gallery, reviewed

There’s a photograph in Nicole Eisenman’s Whitechapel exhibition of the 28-year-old artist, in 1993, sitting at her easel with a big bow in her hair and a bevy of studio assistants – a feminist piss-take of the trope of the heroic male artist surrounded by adoring acolytes. Her resemblance in the photo to stand-up comic Sarah Silverman is not entirely coincidental; Eisenman is Jewish-American and funny. At the time she was producing the bawdy satires on downtown New York lesbian life – battles of the sexes redrawing Michelangelo’s ‘Battle of Cascina’ in the style of Where’s Wally? – which plaster the wall facing the exhibition entrance. She could have been a cartoonist, but she chose art.

Her raucous lesbianism put her on the map, but by the Noughties she wanted a bigger canvas and moved on from sexual politics to broader issues.