Louise Fishman’s work celebrates process. In monumental, energetic surfaces of densely layered color and texture, her paintings exemplify a driven exploration of materials and mark-making. Using scrapers and trowels, along with more traditional paintbrushes, Fishman constructs loosely-gridded compositions by adding, scraping away and re-applying paint, sometimes working and reworking canvases over a long period of time. Remarkable not only for their technical mastery, her abstractions are also emotionally evocative. Physically stunning, her work is continually re-charged by her viewers’ reactions.
Read MoreWhile Fishman’s paintings do not openly narrate the events of her life, they are certainly rooted in her cultural, political and emotional experiences. Born in Philadelphia in 1939, Fishman was active in the feminist movement of the late 1960s and early 70s. During this time, she temporarily abandoned painting for sculptural and material investigations that pursued a more distinctly feminine art. Fishman’s return to painting was anticipated by her seminal 1973 Angry Women series, which represented important figures in the feminist movement. Her subsequent embrace of gestural abstraction unapologetically confronted the male-dominated history of artistic discourse. At a time when postmodernism claimed painting to be 'dead,' Fishman’s decisive re-appropriation of Abstract Expressionism repositioned it for a different era and gender. Continuing her support for the feminist cause, Fishman is also an advocate for gay and lesbian rights. Though she may reference specific personal experiences in her work, the feelings she conveys can be collectively understood.
Fishman lives and works in New York City. Widely shown, her work is represented in many collections, including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; and the Jewish Museum, New York, among others. Awards include three National Endowment for the Arts grants, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among others. She has also participated in several artists’ residencies, most recently at the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy. Fishman has had recent solo exhibitions at Galerie Kienzle &
Gmeiner, Berlin (2008); The John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida (2009); Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco (2010), Jack Tilton Gallery, New York (2012), and Cheim & Read, New York (2012). She is the subject of a comprehensive retrospective at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York scheduled for 2016. She has been represented by Cheim & Read since 1998.
