Beverly Fishman has been thinking about the cure for what ails us for the last forty years. Her candy-colored constructions exist somewhere between painting, sculpture and bad trip: uppers and downers pulsating in happy, fluorescent hues — a medicine cabinet stocked with remedies for being human. From the outset of her career, Fishman has centered her work around the body, probing abstract investigations of disease, identity, and medicine. Since 1999, her oeuvre has propelled towards the latter, delving into the promises of pharmaceuticals as the means for a cure. Fishman positions her sculptural paintings within the concept of polypharmacy—the prescription of multiple medicines to one individual. Glowing fluorescent and smooth matte forms correspond to specific pills as Fishman expertly illustrates the measured precision of an individual’s unique prescription.
“Pharmaceuticals intersect with feminism,” Fishman has commented. “Women were given Valium for their nerves. Why were they nervous? Were they unsatisfied with their lives, with their options? They were anesthetizing an entire generation. Our culture’s relationship to medicine and science is complex. I’m in the unknown. Can abstraction be political and socially relevant? These are things I’ve always thought were important in my work.”
Formal conceptual concerns related to movements such as Minimalism and Light and Space also guide Fishman’s practice, as does intuition. Among her most masterful aesthetic faculties is Fishman’s ability to create specialized, highly emotive color worlds for her exhibitions. “I think about the totality of the experience of the color,” Fishman says. “Color is mysterious to me.”
Fishman’s use of urethane paint on wood lures viewers toward her floating structures; their edges bevel towards the wall, reflecting the neon-painted undersides and creating an artificial glow that mimics a physical light. Both her innate sensibility for color and the sheer scale of the works demand attention that further provokes an interrogation surrounding one’s relationship to the body and its current environment.
“Listening carefully to the world around her, the artist co-opts the language of painting—line, color, form, texture— and compounds it with the art of medicine—diagnosis, management, and sometimes a cure,” writes Rebecca Hart. “A prolific maker, Fishman traces the evolution of medical and pharmacologic discovery, injecting it with personal and cultural content… Aggregating this information as source material for her ongoing exploration, Fishman’s paintings are bellwethers of the effects of industrialized medicine.”
Beverly Fishman was born in Philadelphia, PA in 1955. She received her MFA in 1980 from Yale University and her BFA from the Philadelphia College of Art in 1977. Fishman’s work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; The Contemporary Dayton, Dayton, OH; Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL; Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI; Walter Storms Galerie, Munich, Germany; SOCO Gallery, Charlotte, NC; Gavlak Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Louis Buhl & Co., Detroit, MI; Library Street Collective, Detroit, MI; Ronchini Gallery, London, United Kingdom; Kravets Wehby Gallery, New York, NY; and CUE Art Foundation, New York, NY. She has been included in group exhibitions at numerous international institutions including the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, Turkey; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; The Drawing Center, New York, NY; Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, MI; National Academy of Design, New York, NY; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; and White Columns, New York, NY, among others. Her work may be found in the collections of Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, Turkey; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; Eli and Edythe Broad Museum, East Lansing, MI; MacArthur Foundation Collection, Chicago, IL; Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, Houston, TX; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC, and elsewhere.
Fishman was inducted as a National Academician of the National Academy of Design in 2020. She is the recipient of the Anonymous Was A Woman Award; the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Hassam, Speicher, Betts, & Symons Purchase Award; a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Fine Arts; and a Fellowship Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The artist lives and works in Detroit, Michigan.