Louise Fishman
dal 14/9/2000 al 21/10/2000
Segnalato da
14/9/2000
Louise Fishman
Cheim & Read, New York
Cheim & Read is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Louise Fishman. The art that Fishman made during the first half of the 1970s conveys her commitment to, as well as her advocacy of, a history that was both untold and largely populated by women. It was a history on the margins of the history of power.
Cheim & Read is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings
by Louise Fishman. The following paragraphs are excerpted from the
catalog essay, "Why There Are Great Women Artists," by John Yau
Louise Fishman was born in 1939, and is part of the generation that
includes Robert Mangold (b.1937) and Brice Marden (b.1938). While
both Mangold and Marden were central figures in the ascension of
Minimalism, which, historically speaking, eclipsed Abstract
Expressionism, Fishman took a very different route than that of her
male peers. In 1970, shortly after the beginning of both the Gay
Liberation movement and Feminism, she made the decision to engage
in artmaking practices which were identified with women. In effect, she
stopped painting abstract grids and began making hybrid works--they
were often neither quite sculpture nor painting-- that required, cutting,
tearing, wrapping, sewing and stitching. In doing so, Fishman, like a
number of other women artists at that time, consciously embraced a
territory that Eve Hesse (1936-70) had brilliantly but only briefly
explored
The art that Fishman made during the first half of the 1970s conveys
her commitment to, as well as her advocacy of, a history that was both
untold and largely populated by women. It was a history on the
margins of the history of power. Thus, instead of continuing to define
modular units, she initiated processes that involved acts of repetition.
Now, three decades later, it is this history, in all its personal and public
manifestations, that she continues to bring to bear in her paintings;
and it is her bold and forthright articulation of them within the realm of
abstraction that distinguishes her from both an earlier generation and
from her peers. In this regard, Fishman's independence is exemplary of
the women artists of her generation who wanted to find their own way
in a medium that many critics had declared officially dead by the time
they had arrived on the scene
In her recent paintings, most of which she finished this year, Fishman
continues to extend herself in a number of very different directions, to
push into what is for her new territory. As a body of work, the paintings
seem more different than alike. The one similarity they do share is that
they have lived many lives before Fishman has let them leave her
studio. It is evident that she will work on a painting quite a lot, then
sand or scrape it back down and then paint over it. Through this
process of adding and subtracting and adding again, she is able to
arrive at something quite unexpected. The surfaces are layered, dug
into, torn open, and peeled back. One is reminded of ruined, open
structures built upon the ruins of earlier structures
Despite the intense differences in, and compelling particularities of,
each of her paintings, Fishman continues to subvert all the analogies
and formal presumptions we associate with the gestural painters
connected to Abstract Expressionism. The issue that is central to
Fishman's subversions is her redefining of the analogy --or is it by now
a historical assumption?--which connects oil paint to flesh. When de
Kooning proposed that oil paint had to exist, as it was the only
material that could evoke the flesh, he was thinking of women's bodies
as both idealized and terrifying presences. For him, women were both
goddesses and monsters. They weren't individuals so much as the
outcome of a male projection
As de Kooning defined the burden of painting, oil paint was the only
medium capable of becoming flesh and thus able to make masculine
eroticism palpable in every sense of the word. In his attempt to both
locate and express his understanding of a woman's body in paint, he
tended to articulate a splayed figure in a shallow illusionistic space.
Rejecting parody and ironic citation, characteristics we find in the work
of Peter Saul, for example, or Robert Colescott, Fishman has done
nothing less than transform the post-Cubist, figure-ground relationship
conveyed by de Kooning's supple strokes and hard slashes of thick,
viscous color into a very different proposal. She merges figure and
ground, so that the painting becomes both a body and a field.
Opening Reception: Friday, September 15th, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Cheim & Read 521 West 23rd Street NYC
For additional information please contact Mary Doerhoefer or Amanda
Kingloff at Cheim & Read by calling 212/242-7727, faxing
212/242-7737, or emailing