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Beverly Fishman
Beverly Fishman "UNTITLED" Abstract Silkscreen Stainless Metal 2008

2008

About the Item

"Untitled" by Beverly Fishman is a silkscreen on polished stainless metal filled with bright primary colors and repetitive designs and swirls. Fishman draws on a range of artistic and conceptual influences in crafting her unique canvases, from the industrial-inspired Minimalism of artists like Donald Judd or Frank Stella to techniques taken from the fields of science and medicine. The piece is signed and dated on verso by the artist along with the provenance via a label from the Bruno David Gallery in St. Louis, Missouri stating artist's name, title, date, size and medium and date of 2/2009 when it was in the possession of the gallery. Beverly Fishman’s neon-hued geometric works utilize both shaped canvases and eye-popping forms within the picture plane. Her subjects range from stars and boxes to depictions of human heads and skulls and crossbones and include cameos by pop culturalicons like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Fishman has exhibited in cities around the world, and her works are in the collections of the Cranbrook Art Museum, the MacArthur Foundation Collection, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. She was born in 1955 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is an American painter and sculptor whose work explores science, medicine, and the body. She received her BFA in 1977 from the Philadelphia College of Art, where she studied with Ree Morton, and her MFA in 1980 from Yale University, where she worked with Elizabeth Murray, Mel Bochner, and Judy Pfaff. She is a Guggenhein Fellow, a National Academy of Design Academician, annonymous Was a Woman awardee, and was Artist-in-Residence at Cranbrook Academy of Art between 1992 and 2019, where she was Head of the Painting Department. Although best known for her painted reliefs based on the forms of drugs and pharmaceuticals, Fishman has consistently worked in multiple media, such as cast-resin and glass sculpture, as well as silkscreen painting on metal, large-scale wall painting, and outdoor murals. While Fishman's artworks often look abstract, they are based on appropriated shapes, patterns, and images drawn from the pharmaceutical and illicit drug industries as well as multiple forms of scientific and medical imaging. As she noted in 2017, "Although they look abstract, my paintings are tied to problems like attention-deficit disorder, opioid addiction, anxiety, and depression. Their forms connect them to the social problems of today." While at Yale, Fishman began to explore sculpture, an investigation that occupied her intensely for the first half of the 1980s. Made of burlap, plaster, plastic, chicken wire, rope, and various types of paint, Fishman's sculptures resembled violently disassembled bodies, referencing the history of post-minimalism as well as contemporaneous feminist critiques of the patriarchal view of women as primarily corporeal and abject. As Fishman later recalled, "Looking at anatomy books and everything under the skin, I was interested in the body as viscera. I created large, abject sculptures that showed human beings as internal, biological, and centered in the flesh. I was interested not in what we looked like externally but in what we were as material, chemical, and electrical organisms. As a feminist, I was also highly aware of how society tried to reduce women to physical and emotional characteristics. In part, my sculptures were a way to highlight and subvert those readings of women as (mere) bodies." Working generatively (using earlier artworks as the starting point for new ones), Fishman began to make large-scale drawings based on the sculptures, reimagining her organic forms and socially-critical concepts in a new medium. In particular, these expressionistically-rendered, brightly-colored pastel "bodyscapes," which Fishman pursued between 1985 and 1987, were constructed so as to undermine distinctions between inside and outside worlds. During the late 1980s, Fishman switched processes again and began to create mixed-media paintings on wood that incorporated collage elements made with photocopier machines. "Appropriating and abstracting images of [human] cells, I sought to link the reproduction of images to mutation and biological development. Living in New York during the AIDS crisis, I was aware of how a virus could define one’s identity. I wanted to represent the body while engaging with the technologies through which our interiors were visualized and reproduced." As a result of this focus technologically-mediated vision and the parallels between organic and technological forms of reproduction, the shapes of Fishman's mixed-media paintings began to morph, referencing the history of the shaped canvas, while mimicking the forms of microscopes, telescopes, and petri dishes. Fishman's art has been the subject of major reviews by art critics Donald Kuspit and Jason Stopa in Art in American. Dorothy Mayhall in Art in American published the exhibition catalog for the show Beverly Fishman: Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, shown November 4 – December 6, 1985 at the Housatonic Museum of Art. Fishman was interviewed by Leslie Wayne of the online magazine Art Critical about three solo shows: Pain Management at the Library Street Collective in Detroit, Michigan; Another Day in Paradise at the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts in Birmingham, Alabama, and Dose, curated by Nick Cave at the CUE Foundation in NYC. In 2017 Zachary Small reviewed Beverly Fishman: Color Coding Big Pharma for art21 magazine, and she was interviewed by Jason Stopa for Art in America magazine about her abstract art derived from a focus on pill and medication addictions. Stopa wrote that Fishman "creates powerful abstract paintings that address technology and the pharmaceutical industry" and adds, "Fishman is a painter with the concerns of a sculptor, making paintings that require high levels of production. Her studio practice includes manufacturing uniquely shaped supports and consulting with automotive paint specialists to get the background she needs to achieve industrial finishes."
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