Louise Fishman: A Retrospective

Louise Fishman: A Retrospective, the first museum survey of this senior American painter, includes a selection of more than fifty works created by the artist over almost fifty years. Fishman employs the formal language of Abstract Expressionism to create large-scale, gestural abstractions that share the physicality, dynamism, and emotional power of that movement, yet lack the bravado. 

Visually poetic and intimate in tone, Fishman’s work is informed by a feminist perspective as well as aspects of her Jewish background. This exhibition will trace the course and development of Fishman’s career featuring, hard-edged grid paintings of the late 1960s, feminist-inspired woven-and-stitched works and explosive “Angry Paintings” of the 1970s, “Remembrance and Renewal” paintings made in response to a transformative visit to Auschwitz and Terezin in 1988, culminating in the calligraphic and gestural abstractions for which she is widely known. 

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

Whether you go or not, the exhibition catalog, Louise Fishman, pays tribute to her achievements and the unapologetically emotional cadences of her abstract paintings. Long overdue, this monograph on the groundbreaking artist Louise Fishman chronologically traces her creative path over 50 years, exploring how in the 1960s and ’70s she negotiated the constraints established by the male-dominated Abstract Expressionists to make for herself an adventurous and deeply personal painting practice. Includes full-color images and insightful essays that delve into Fishman’s relationship with the Abstract Expressionist, feminist, and Jewish communities.