BEVERLY FISHMAN

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – MILES McENERY GALLERY is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings and sculpture by Beverly Fishman. I Dream of Sleep will open 10 September at 525 West 22nd Street and remain on view through 10 October 2020. The show is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring an essay by Amy Rahn.

Since the early 1980s, Beverly Fishman has developed a distinctive body of hard-edge, dimensional, abstract paintings that are infused with emotion. While her works have been compared to those of Finish Fetish artists like John McCracken and Robert Irwin, as well as those of Peter Halley, she affirms that her practice deviates from a direct dialogue with (implicitly male) hard-edged abstraction. Fishman’s works are instead grounded in a “messier lineage of paintings and sculpture that occupy an interchangeable space between form and feeling - that channel loss and joy, contemplation and analysis along the lines of color.” Shape and color are united with questions of identity.

The paintings in I Dream of Sleep are based on the slick, angular packaging of the pharmaceutical industry. They suggest the sleek corporate marketing and the fluorescent language of caution, even emergency. Each one contaminates the spaces of art and pharmaceuticals, speaking of the rage of loss in the language of corporate cure. Instilled with the standardized shapes of mass-produced medications, Fishman’s works deliver what looks like an opaque, machine high-gloss nish that, paradoxically, is meticulously handmade.

Fishman appropriates familiar and addictive pill forms, drawing both the philosophies and the physical manifestations of pharmaceuticals into conversation with their intensely felt human repercussions. As an artist who came of age in New York during the AIDS crisis and having cared for multiple ailing family members, Fishman’s life experiences have been marked by the medicalization of the people she has loved. Deeply personal, the selection of works on view are partially motivated by her sister Judy’s passing in December 2018 after a month-long stay at a New Jersey hospital.

BEVERLY FISHMAN (b. 1955, Philadelphia, PA) received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1977 from Philadelphia College of Art and her Master of Fine Arts degree in 1980 from Yale University.

Recent solo exhibitions include “I Dream of Sleep,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; “Untitled Monotypes,” Louis Buhl & Co., Detroit, MI; “Fantastic Voyage, 1985-1987,” Library Street Collective, Detroit, MI; “Future Perfect,” Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL; Ronchini Gallery, London, United Kingdom; “Synthetic Wonderland,” Gavlak Gallery, Palm Beach, FL; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; “Chemical Sublime,” Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL; “T. N. N.,” Kravets Wehby Gallery, New York, NY; “DOSE” (curated by Nick Cave), CUE Art Foundation, New York, NY; “Another Day in Paradise,” Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, University of Alabama, Birmingham, AL and “Pain Management,” Library Street Collective, Detroit, MI.

Recent group exhibitions include “Shapeshifters: Transformations in Contemporary Art,” Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; “The Responsive Eye Revisited: Then, Now, and In-Between,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; “Shape, Rattle, and Roll,” Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, NY; “Driving Forces: Contemporary Art from the Collection of Ann and Ron Pizzuti,” Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; “Inaugural Exhibition,” Gavlak Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA; “Constructed,” Contemporary Art Galleries, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT; “cart, horse, cart” (curated by Michael Goodson and Anna Stothart), Lehmann Maupin, New York, NY; “Double Edged: Geometric Abstraction Then and Now,” Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; “Grafik,” Harper’s Books, East Hampton, NY; “Xeriscape - Nina Chanel Abney, Rosson Crow, Beverly Fishman, Tschabalala Self and Wendy White,” Library Street Collective, Detroit, MI; “Front International” (curated by Michelle Grabner), Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH and “Public Matter,” Library Street Collective, Detroit, MI.

Her work is included in many public collections including Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; Discovery Museum, Bridgeport, CT; Housatonic Museum of Art, Bridgeport, CT; Kresge Art Museum, East Lansing, MI; Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, CT; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Stamford Museum & Nature Center, Stamford, CT; Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH; and Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC.

She is the recipient of many awards including Anonymous Was A Woman Award; Hassam, Speicher, Betts, and Symons Purchase Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters; John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship; Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award; Artist Space Exhibition Grant; and NEA Fellowship Grant, among others.

Beverly Fishman lives and works in Detroit, MI.

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Installation Views

Selected Works

Press Release