Fischl has embraced the description of himself as a painter of the suburbs, not generally considered appropriate subject matter prior to his generation. Some of Fischl's earlier works have a theme of
adolescent sexuality and
voyeurism, such as
Sleepwalker (1979) which depicts an adolescent boy masturbating into a children's pool.
Bad Boy (1981) and
Birthday Boy (1983) both depict young boys looking at older women shown in provocative poses on a bed. In
Bad Boy, the subject is surreptitiously slipping his hand into a purse. In
Birthday Boy, the child is depicted naked on the bed. In 2002, Fischl collaborated with the
Museum Haus Esters in
Krefeld,
Germany. Haus Esters is a 1928 home, designed by
Mies van der Rohe in 1928 to be a private home. It now houses changing exhibitions. Fischl refurbished it as a home (though not particularly in
Bauhaus style) and hired models who, for several days, pretended to be a couple who lived there. He took 2,000 photographs, which he reworked
digitally and used as the basis for a series of paintings, one of which, the monumental
Krefeld Redux, Bedroom #6 (Surviving the Fall Meant Using You for Handholds) (2004) was purchased by
Paul Allen featured in the 2006 Double Take Exhibit at
Experience Music Project, where it was juxtaposed with a much smaller
Degas pastel. This is by no means the first time Fischl has been compared to Degas. Twenty years earlier, reviewing a show of 28 Fischl paintings at New York's
Whitney Museum, art critic
John Russell wrote in
The New York Times, "[Degas] sets up a charged situation with his incomparable subtlety of insight and characterization, and then he goes away and leaves us to figure it out as best we can. That is the tactic of Fischl, too, though the society with which he deals has an unstructured brutality and a violence never far from release that are very different from the nicely calibrated cruelties that Degas recorded." Fischl also collaborated with
Jamaica Kincaid,
E. L. Doctorow and
Frederic Tuten combining paintings and sketches with literary works. Composer
Bruce Wolosoff was inspired by Fischl's watercolors to compose "The Loom" for the classical ensemble
Eroica Trio. Eric Fischl is represented by
Skarstedt Gallery, New York. From November 7, 2025 - June 14, 2026, the
Phoenix Art Museum exhibited
Eric Fischl: Stories Told. It featured 40 large-scale paintings Fischl created over the last 5 decades. ==Personal life==