Louise Fishman: A Retrospective Opens at the Neuberger Museum of Art April 3

At age 77, Louise Fishman, one of America’s most important women artists, will enjoy her first career retrospective, organized by the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York. It has been a long time in coming. Ms. Fishman, whose work embraces the Abstract Expressionist tradition but reinvents it, has long fought for the meaningful recognition that Neuberger Museum of Art Chief Curator Helaine Posner believes has eluded many women artists because of sexism and other cultural biases. Ms. Posner curated several exhibitions in recent years featuring the work of contemporary women artists that have received significant critical acclaim. She believes this exhibition reflects Fishman’s finest hour: “She’s at the top of her game.”

In the 224-page, fully illustrated catalogue that accompanies the exhibition Louise Fishman: A Retrospective, Neuberger Director Tracy Fitzpatrick notes that the “Neuberger Museum of Art collaborates with artists whose work is not only of the highest art historical significance and aesthetic quality but also demonstrates critical perspectives that have influenced their peers and had a lasting impact on younger generations. Louise Fishman is such an artist.” Concurrently, an exhibition of Fishman’s sketchbooks, sculpture, and miniature paintings works will be shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, in Paper Louise Tiny Fishman Rock from May 4 – August 14, 2016. Contributors to the catalogue: Posner; Ingrid Schaffner, Chief Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; art critic and writer Nancy Princenthal; and Carrie Moyer, painter, art critic and an associate professor at Hunter College.

Louise Fishman: A Retrospective, on view from April 3 through July 31, 2016 at the Neuberger, features over 50 works, created by the artist from 1968 through 2015. This exhibition traces the course and development of Fishman’s career, featuring early hard-edged grid paintings of the late 1960s, feminist-inspired woven-and-stitched works and the explosive “Angry Paintings” of the 1970s, “Remembrance and Renewal” works made in response to a transformative visit to Auschwitz and Terezin in1988, culminating in the calligraphic and gestural abstractions for which she is widely known. Paintings inspired by the artist’s residency at the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice in 2011 and by the work of British artist J.M.W. Turner complete the exhibition. Throughout it all, Fishman experimented with style and medium, and she varied her approach. Yet, she ultimately remained true to abstraction, employing a thicket of brush strokes that are dynamic, bold, energetic, passionate, and intensely physical, often infused by a spirit of resistance and discontent. “My paintings are very athletic, very musical; they’re architectural,” the artist recently explained to a visitor to her studio. “Feminism taught me I could do anything.”

Fishman’s paintings contain energetic surfaces of layered color and texture, created by applying, then scraping away, then re-applying paint with scrapers, trowels and brushes of varying sizes and coarseness onto tightly woven linen. The color palette can be narrow or expansive, and brush strokes often travel in many directions, giving her canvases considerable life and depth. The results are, as Posner describes it, “the large-scale, gestural abstractions that share the physicality, dyna­mism, and emotional force of [the Abstract Expressionist] movement while remaining visually poetic and intimate in tone.”

In her catalogue essay, Carrie Moyer characterizes Fishman’s approach this way: “By following the current of her own work (and without anyone’s permission), Fishman has developed a muscular painterly abstraction that compels us to see the gesture as highly individual, rather than as a proxy for ‘feeling.’” In her paintings, the emotions conveyed by the formal idiom of Abstract Expressionism become straightforward, stripped of both the movement’s original existential burden and the overworked interpretations that followed.”

It was a chance meeting on a beach in Ocean City, New Jersey, that led the young Louise Fishman to apply to and be accepted into an art school, where her career as an artist was born. In high school and early college, all she wanted to be was a basketball player, even though she was raised in a home that prized art, music (especially jazz and contemporary Russian), poetry and dance – influences that later came into play. In art school, “My voice came quickly; I liked representational, semi-abstract work,” she says. Soon, her style shifted and became “more hard edge, with large teetering shapes, largely black and white.” She obsessively consumed art publications and visited museums, absorbing all the currents that dominated the contemporary art world. But throughout her life, she also learned from Renaissance, expressionist, and postmodernist masters. Fishman was active in the feminist movement of the late 1960s and early 70s, and raged against a male-dominated art world. She also became a passionate advocate for gay and lesbian rights.

Widely shown, Fishman’s 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).

Louise Fishman: A Retrospective is organized by the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, SUNY and curated by Helaine Posner, Chief Curator. Generous support for this exhibition has been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and by Susan and James Dubin. Additional support has been provided by Lauren B. Cramer, Helen Stambler Neuberger and James Neuberger, Sara and Michelle Vance Waddell, Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art and by the Purchase College Foundation.

The Neuberger Museum of Art will present the following programs and events in conjunction with the exhibition:

Wednesday, April 6, 4:30 – 6pm

Louise Fishman in Conversation with Helaine Posner

at the Neuberger Museum of Art Study

Celebrated American artist Louise Fishman discusses her life, work, sources of inspiration, and artistic process with Neuberger Chief Curator Helaine Posner.

Tickets: General admission: $10; complimentary to Purchase College students, staff, and faculty, as well as Neuberger Museum of Art Circle Level Members. General Admission: $10.

Wednesday, April 13, 12:30 pm

Idith Meshulam Korman: A Piano Convert Inspired by Louise Fishman

at the Neuberger Museum Theater Gallery

Idith Meshulam Korman, pianist and artistic director of Ensemble Pi, is one of the most foremost interpreters of and advocates for contemporary American classical music. During this special event, she performs musical works selected in response to the visual practice of her friend, Louise Fishman.

Tickets: General admission: $10; complimentary to Purchase College students, staff, and faculty, as well as Neuberger Museum of Art Circle Level Members. General Admission: $10

Wednesday, April 27, 5pm

Louise Fishman Study Day

Neuberger Museum of Art Study

This study day will provide an intensive and focused look at Louise Fishman’s life and work from a variety of perspectives. Presenters include Faye Hirsch, senior editor at Art in America and visiting Associate Professor of Art+Design at Purchase College; Catherine Lord, Professor Emerita of Art, University of California, Irvine, Claire Trevor School of Art; and Richard Meyer, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History at Stanford University.

Tickets: General admission: $10; complimentary to Purchase College students, staff, and faculty, as well as Neuberger Museum of Art Circle Level Members. General Admission: $10

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The Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York is the premier museum of modern, African, and contemporary art in the Westchester/Fairfield County area. An outstanding arts and education institution, the Museum was conceived with the dual purpose of serving both as an important cultural resource to its regional, national, and international audiences, and as an integral part of Purchase College. Support for the Museum’s collection, exhibitions, publications, and education programs is provided by grants from public and private agencies, individual contributions, the Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art and its Board of Directors, the Purchase College Foundation, and the State University of New York.

The Museum is located at 735 Anderson Hill Road in Purchase, N.Y. (Westchester)

914-251-6100

www.neuberger.org

Photo caption: Louise Fishman, The Art of Losing, 2003. Oil on linen. 80 x 60 inches, 203.2 x 152.4 centimeters.Courtesy of the artist and Cheim & Read, New York.