Selected Works

Miles McEnery Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Beverly Fishman, on view 8 May - 21 June at 515 West 22nd Street, accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring a text by Meredith Mendelsohn. 

For her fourth exhibition with the gallery, and on the occasion of her 70th birthday, Beverly Fishman presents a bold new body of work that expands upon her established practice in unprecedented ways. These latest pieces are more intricate, fluid, and compositionally complex than ever before, reflecting her continuous exploration and ever-expanding artistic vision.

Fishman has spent most of her artistic career investigating the relationship between the body and disease, probing at the pharmaceutical promise of a costly “cure.” In her pursuit of these questions, she has developed a distinct visual vocabulary of sculptural wall reliefs that combine glowing fluorescent and smooth matte forms, each geometric fragment representing a medicinal dose. Sleek and collage-like, these compositions mimic the precision of individualized prescriptions. In this new body of work, Fishman straddles a line between calculated precision and spontaneity. Though titled, Equilibrium, these new compositions subtly subvert the term—they appear casually sorted, scattered like pills into an open palm. This tension between balance and chaos is precisely where Fishman’s mastery lies; their effortless harmony is a result of her exacting control and intention. 

With a Finish Fetish luster, their polished surfaces enhance the seductive promise of relief—forming an alluring visual cocktail that embodies both remedy and reliance.These visual motifs echo principles of High Modernist design, but rather than merely reference them, Fishman exaggerates them to a point of mechanistic perfection such that they unravel their own ideals, underscoring the dangerous extremes of our pharmaceutical system—a force that can create new ideals of bodily perfection, render deviation as ailment, and invent solutions for a fee.

Meredith Mendelsohn notes that Fishman’s work “seems incredibly relevant, with our massive aging population, growing number of adolescents on mind-altering medications, and radical changes to healthcare. But Fishman doesn’t want to get bogged down in the details. ‘I just want my work to start a conversation that doesn’t have a didactic end, to provide an experience that makes you want to stay long enough to think,’ she says. And that she has. Her growing body of geometric abstractions not only catapult a pressing cultural reality to the forefront of our consciousness, but they are incredibly fulfilling to look at. The placebo effect is real.”