Figurative painting may have ceded some ground to abstraction recently, but figuration is still thick on the walls and Eisenman is one of its leading proponents, if not its feisty godmother. This year, the American artist’s superb touring retrospective What Happened reached its only US stop, the MCA Chicago, showcasing queer politics and art historical references alongside evocations of digital anomie and processionlike forays into three dimensions. (It was an apt choice of city, too, since the Chicago Imagists’s mix of humour and scabrousness is part of Eisenman’s artistic DNA.) For a summer autumn show at Hauser & Wirth in Paris, meanwhile, she allowed painting and sculpture to commingle in ways that felt inventive, from paintings with sculptural addenda to paintings of sculpture to, well, just sculptures surrounded by paintings. And in October, doubling down, Eisenman unveiled a monumental public sculpture – an assisted readymade of a toppled 1969 crane titled Fixed Crane – in New York’s Madison Square Park.