Eric Fischl’s paintings from the 1980s are based on a figurative, neo-realistic style with a narrative content, the theme of which is suburban America. The pictures often feature a disturbing or erotic undertone. This is certainly the case in this large composition, Birth of Love, in which a dark, voyeuristic, three-part scene – like a triptych or altarpiece – presents a slice of suburban US life, with no hint of peace or idyll. In the middle section, an illuminated naked woman is rising from the boot of a car in a kind of erotic resurrection scene. The left-hand section confronts us with three children mourning the death of the family dog, while the right-hand section features a darkened house with a typical American porch. Using powerful contrasts between light and shadow and heavily symbolic content, the scene is a dramatic revelation of the shadowy aspects of suburban life. Such works stem from Fischl’s own personal narrative as a child in a suburb of Long Island, where the curtains were drawn to hide family secrets, including his mother’s alcoholism. Both this and the trauma of his mother’s suicide in 1970 formed the basis for several of Eric Fischl’s renditions of middle-class suburban life in the United States, with social taboos lurking behind the apparently neat façades.