Category: contemporary art

Shozo Michikawa – SASAMA @ Erskine, Hall & Coe, London / 1 – 24 September 2020

Shozo Michikawa – Natural Ash Sculptural Form, 2020, stoneware, 43 x 16 cm. Image Courtesy Erskine, Hall & Coe, photography by Stuart Burford.

If they look a little like domestic props in a cubist interior, then the fleeting similarity between a vase form in a painting by Georges Braque or Juan Gris and the ceramic sculptural forms of Shozo Michikawa is no more than that, an immediate visual impression. As with all ‘It looks a bit like…’ statements, to labour any comparison in this case would be a fruitless indulgence.

The thought does however point to an interesting divergence between painting and ceramics; that is the central importance of technique in the discipline of ceramics. When I talk about Shozo Michikawa’s work I feel more comfortable using the term ceramics rather than pottery. I guess this is a subconscious bias away from functional studio pottery and towards something which might be vainly reaching for the exalted, the rarefied – art basically. Under the slightest scrutiny this bias falls apart because of the fact that in order to produce anything of quality in pottery, whether it is slip-decorated table ware or non-functional gallery ceramics, the amount of practice, failure, recovery, and knowledge required is staggering. When it comes to pottery, you can’t fake it.

Shozo Michikawa, Shino Sculptural Form, 2019, stoneware, 19 x 15 cm. Image Courtesy Erskine, Hall & Coe, photography by Stuart Burford.

Shozo Michikawa was born in 1953 in Hokkaido, Japan. At a certain stage during his initial career in business he took up evening classes in art. It was here that he discovered his passion and talent for pottery. A few years later, Michikawa quit business to devote himself to ceramics. Over the years he learned the skills involved in pottery and some more conventional examples of traditional tea bowls (chawan) are included in the current exhibition at Erskine, Hall & Coe.

Stoneware tea bowls by Shozo Michikawa. 9 cm high to 9.5 cm high. Image Courtesy Erskine, Hall & Coe, photography by Stuart Burford.

Michikawa is an artist who has always shunned a studio pottery affiliation, a system which forms the core of the Japanese pottery scene. He prefers to have the freedom to produce exactly what he wants without having to consider the demands of the client. Free of the limitations of studio pottery, Michikawa has developed a range of unique sculptural series in which he experiments freely and playfully, riffing on traditional Japanese pottery shapes and using classic glazes such as shino and kohiki. The pieces in this show were made during the bi-annual Sasama International Ceramics Festival during a three-day firing in an anagama kiln. Michikawa founded the Sasama International Ceramics Festival in 2011 and the exhibition includes photography of the Sasama region by Yoshinori Seguchi.

Shozo Michikawa, Kohiki Sculptural Form, 2020, stoneware, 38.5 x 13.5 cm. Image courtesy Erskine, Hall & Coe, photography by Stuart Burford.

Another point of divergence between painting and ceramics is that it is fascinating to watch a talented potter at work – something which is not always the case in painting with its ponderous interludes. This is true for example in the case of Ken Matsuzaki throwing tea bowls off the hump. But where the pleasure of watching tea bowls form, each one masterfully imperfect, may be mesmerising, watching Michikawa turn a dull, dumb block of clay into a dynamic exploding/imploding sculptural form is seat-of-your-pants stuff. (See the link below for a 2018 recording of Michikawa throwing at Leksands folkhögskola Art College in Sweden.)

Shozo Michikawa, Kohiki with Handle, 2020, stoneware, 61 x 27 x 14.5 cm. Image Courtesy Erskine, Hall & Coe, photography by Stuart Burford.

If the forms at times seem to be frozen in a state of collapse or explosion, then it is because in the process of creating them they come close to doing both. One essential skill to develop as a potter is to do as much as possible of the final shaping of the piece on the wheel to minimise the amount of trimming and altering required later. Michikawa takes this dictum to another level as he slices and gouges the form to create the basis for what will shortly emerge as the final piece, or as he transplants bits of clay from one part of the form to another where they will perhaps be more useful. The artist’s thinking is laid bare and it is a thrilling pleasure to observe him reassess the shape as it develops and to recover from near failure with brutish and excruciating-to-watch interventions. The throwing of the lacerated form is executed by hand, using traditional Japanese forming tools, and by using lengths of timber wedged unceremoniously into the centre of the piece. With the form of the clay prepped in this way, the final shape comes together with a few delicately controlled spins of the wheel. From start to finish there is an economy of process and mastery of technique which are the very same as those which have been employed in Japanese ceramics for centuries.

Watch a fascinating demonstration given by Shozo Michikawa at Leksands folkhögskola (Art College), recorded on July 15, 2018.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxJrIoEn__o&t=1441s

200 words #29 / Erika Verzutti

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Erika Verzutti – Man Ray com Peixe / Man Ray with Fish, 2019, Bronze, cast aluminium and oil, 70 x 57 x 10 cm, Unique work in a series of 3, © Erika Verzutti. Photo: Eduardo Ortega. Courtesy Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo/Rio de Janeiro.

The short-lived publication Documents (1929 – 1930) – edited by Georges Bataille – exemplified a shift in much visual art in the early 20th century towards drawing from and combining influences from wildly differing sources both within and far beyond the arts. It is a tendency towards a heterogeneous aesthetic which has become so ubiquitous that nowadays it informs first principles in most art schools from foundation level on. And whilst it lends an air of research facility to the average artist’s studio, it can also, through the collision of dissonant sources, muddy the task of judging the quality of the artwork produced.

In such an open field as the visual arts have become, one difficulty is to consolidate disparate elements skilfully. Erika Verzutti produces painted bronze and papier-mâché wall-mounted reliefs which stretch the territory between painting and sculpture. The surfaces might be pummelled and gouged playfully, then cast in bronze, then painted irreverently in common acrylic. The artist’s process spins 360 degrees from kitchen table craft through industrial fabrication and back without pitting the base and the exalted medium against one another. In Verzutti’s work there is humour but not the ham-fisted variety, allusion without explication, and beauty both superficial and profound.

Carne Sintética @ Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel

Two previous articles on Erika Verzutti on theglazelondon:

Erika Verzutti @ Andrew Krepps

Erika Verzutti @ Alison Jacques

Remembering Abstract Art – Part 1

Remembering Abstract Art – Part 1 is the first of a series of personal reflections on abstract art.

I remember sitting in the living room one sunny morning, age 11, flicking through a book of Picasso’s late paintings, when I lingered on a colour print of a canvas from October 8, 1968 – Reclining Nude with Necklace. When I think about it now, I feel certain that it was a sunny day, until it occurs to me that, regardless of fact, my memory of those days is invariably sunny. My discovery of that painting also replays in memory as a moment of revelation, as the very sudden moment when abstract art began to make sense to me.

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Nude Woman with Necklace – Pablo Picasso 1881 – 1973, Tate, purchased 1983, Photo Credit: ©Tate, London, 2019.

The painting is, on the face of it, not abstract at all. It is entirely consistent with Picasso’s instinct towards figuration. It was painted at the height of the artist’s final period and is in many ways typical of the loose and large paintings he made in the last years of his life. Some might describe it as the carefree splashings of an artist who felt he had long since earned the right to forego any mediating anxiety about what he put on canvas or how he went about it. For one biographer the last decade of Picasso’s production was such an irrelevance that it was simply omitted. Picasso’s aesthetic instinct was solidly European, and despite the gestural excess of the painting, even at this late stage his hand could not make a single mark which did not in some way represent something. And in Reclining Nude with Necklace, every inch of the canvas is put to work to this end; down to the triangle of pinkish underpainting left exposed to serve as the woman’s supporting left arm, the flecks of impasto which tell us the necklace is reflecting light, or the accumulation of pinkish white here and there denoting highlights across the body. The painting has numerous painterly tricks of the trade which help us conjure a person, a divan, a light source, and a necklace to pick up that light as it falls from left to right.

It is the intensity of Picasso’s disinhibited paintwork however that makes this painting so interesting. Seen from this perspective, the entire canvas in fact works against the artist’s impulse to depict. The woman’s hair, matted against the leaning arm, is an abstract tangle abruptly cut off by the dense blue mass of the background. The crimson wedge of impasto paint representing the shadow between buttock and breast is of equal visual value within the whole to the opaque expanse of the red divan on which the figure rests. The woman’s face is etched with frantic scrawls little different from the ones which identify the upper left-hand side of the canvas and the raised right leg. Despite the sheer excess there is an overall levelling of tonal and spatial values across the canvas. At a certain point the subject disappears and the paint, and nothing but the paint itself, commands our attention. The revelation, to me, was that Picasso’s woman appeared to fluctuate between two states; of being the reclining woman and of being paint pure and simple.

Another more recent and reliable memory – and one which occasionally admits cloud – is from a trip I took to New York in 1999. By that stage I had developed a committed preoccupation with the question of what exactly constitutes an abstraction, and I was constantly on the lookout for what I saw as fine examples of it. My introduction to the Picasso painting had taken root in my memory as a moment in which I had become a believer in abstract art. From then on, I saw abstraction as a condition of perception which could in some way be pinned down and described, and believed that if there was an abstract art, there must consequently be a territory which marked the boundary between that which we perceived as abstract and that which was not.

On a clammy April day in New York, the sky as I now remember it threatening to collapse slowly into the streets from the weight of its greyness, I climbed the stairs to the rooms of Brooke Alexander to see the Helmut Dorner exhibition – Broken Knee. Now my memory records another moment of silent personal revelation as I walk excitedly from painting to painting.

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Helmut Dorner – ddd / From the 1999 exhibition Broken Knee at Brooke Alexander / Image courtesy of Brooke Alexander Editions, New York

If Picasso’s Reclining Woman with Necklace had seemed to me to be an abstract painting despite the evidence, Helmut Dorner’s paintings struck me as the closest thing I had seen to the very definition of abstraction. Where Picasso stumbled from figuration into the territory of what was then still recent American abstract painting through sheer brazenness of paintwork, everything about Dorner’s paintings worked to produce deliberate abstraction.

Best appreciated in the flesh, these paintings have a unique presence which is the result of a combination of details. They are relatively shallow Perspex boxes, mounted on the wall like any canvas. There are sparsely distributed paint marks, blobs, and dribbles – some oil paint, some pigmented resin. The Perspex boxes – in every other way performing a very convincing substitution for the traditional canvas – are missing a side here and there. Through the transparent face of each ‘canvas’ we can see the screws at the top corners on which the piece has been hung. Through the surface also, we can see subtle shadows of the paint marks against the wall, the shadows being duplicated by gallery spotlights and daylight.

Where the Reclining Woman gives the effect of paint mischievously playing around with our impulse to see a figure on a divan, the image constantly breaking down amongst the jostling paint marks, Dorner’s paintings are dedicated spaces within which any single mark floats with its presence uncorrupted by our imaging instinct. So independent are these paint marks that they cast shadows! The Perspex ‘canvas’ is a straight substitute for surfaces such as cotton, linen or wood panel – the kinds of surfaces on which paint has always traditionally laid. But by virtue of its transparency, the Perspex support suggests that painting is nothing more nor less than a conjuring trick – a series of movements choreographed to make us believe something has happened when it hasn’t. And by removing a section of the Perspex at the side here and there, the artist is inviting us to look behind an already transparent surface, as though in anticipation of the familiar question asked of painting across the centuries – ‘How was it done?’.

I’m not sure how long I spent examining those paintings, but I left the gallery floating as loose and happy as the shadow of paint, as I remember.

Josep Grau-Garriga @ Michel Soskine Inc. Madrid / 13 Sept -24 Nov, 2018

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Josep Grau-Garriga / Cada Día, 1992, Tapestry, 300 x 180cm, Image courtesy of Michel Soskine Inc.

An odd fact at the heart of painting is that it retains such a widely unquestioned status above so many other forms of visual art despite its debt to, and sometimes yearning for, certain qualities of those other media. In commentary, the infinite contortions of the painted surface are routinely spoken about in the borrowed vocabulary of other media. A painting’s presence as object might become so determinant to the way it is interpreted that it is spoken of as being sculptural. And in describing the interaction of motifs on a painting’s surface, such as Piet Mondrian’s experiments with lattices of coloured adhesive tape in his late New York paintings, we might understandably think of tapestry and opt for the word weave. Of course, the term painterly is equally applied across other media when describing a certain trace of fluidity in motif, surface texture, or colour. I would argue however, that what is painterly in painting is that which is evocative to us of the physicality of many other media.

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Josep Grau-Garriga / Textures Fan Mar, 1977, Tapestry, 220 x 225cm, Image courtesy of Michel Soskine Inc.

Tapestry, by virtue of its relative flatness and the range of pictorial possibility available to it, is perhaps more prone than many other art forms to direct comparison with painting. Whilst there is nothing odd today about tapestry occupying the gallery wall, as a stand-alone art form in Europe it has not always been viewed as a medium independent of and equal to painting. The Catalan artist Josep Grau-Garriga (1929, Catalonia – 2011, Angers) speculated that the very practicality of tapestry, in that it is relatively light and easy to roll for transportation, inspired the shift in painting studios around the 14th century from painting on wooden panels to painting directly onto prepared fabric. Whether or not this transition in painting was as straightforward in origin as the artist describes, painting did go on to experience many other transformations across the centuries, whilst the art of tapestry largely remained the remit of artisans until as late as the early 20th century – a factor which served to insulate it from harsh, transformative creative forces.

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Josep Grau-Garriga / Personatge Blau, 1992, Tapestry, 200 x 80cm, Image courtesy of Michel Soskine Inc.

Whilst artists such as Joan Miró and Antoni Tàpies – also Catalan incidentally – used fabric and rope with great inventiveness, they did not go down the same route as Grau-Garriga of allowing the material to speak for the entire piece. In their work, fabric typically remained either a support for paint or simply another component within a sort of assemblage involving the two as distinct elements. Grau-Garriga made the transition from painting to tapestry during the late 1950s, during which period he met the artist Jean Lurçat – a key figure in the resurgence of interest in the art form in Europe amongst artists. By the time of their meeting in 1957 Grau-Garriga had already started an involvement with the Casa Aymat – a former carpet manufacturer in Catalonia and now a creative space. In France, the artist would consolidate his skills and make artistic connections.

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Josep Grau-Garriga / De L’Afrique També, 1998, Tapestry, 200 x 113 x 35cm, Image courtesy of Michel Soskine Inc.

Artists who come to a new medium with an established practice in another tend to see that second medium as a means towards expanding on the possibilities of the first. Grau-Garriga’s stated aim however, was to address the tradition of tapestry as a craft in the service of painting – a medium to be manipulated to order by an artisan rather than being worked on directly by the artist. To really address this, and to begin to push the medium in new directions, there could be no half measures. In approaching the art of tapestry from the premise of equal status to painting in its articulation of texture, motif, colour and meaning, Josep Grau-Garriga contributed towards an important and continuing realignment of many art forms traditionally thought of as craft within the shadow of painting.

Josep Grau-Garriga on tapestry (French)

Josep Grau-Garriga at Michel Soskine Inc, Madrid

200 words #25 / Yann Gerstberger

DSC_8776.jpgYann Gerstberger / Sex Messenger, 2018, 280 cm x 250 cm, 110,2 inches x 98,4 inches, Coton, linoleum, colle néoprène, pigments naturels (grana cochenille) photo Hugard & Vanoverschelde. Courtesy Sorry we’re Closed Gallery

The word painterly often gets thrown around without thought for the scope of its significance. When applied to the weave of a tapestry or an area of glaze on a ceramic pot, its very use implies the primacy of painting above crafts. One irony however, is that the thing which is considered painterly in painting is that moment when its very nature as a material – pigment suspended in a medium – is most evident. In that moment, I feel we are in fact appreciating painting as craft. So, it should seem strange for an observer to lend the term to other art forms when in truth, a painting is sometimes most painterly when it reminds us of other media.

In Yann Gerstberger’s large scale tapestries, the heft of the weave and the complexity of fantastical, crude, exotic motifs as they seem about to bleed into each other, may well bring to mind a heavily-worked painted surface. The exaggerated flatness of tapestry weave – in Gerstberger’s case market sourced fabrics and hand-dyed mop-head strands glued to a vinyl surface – is enhanced by the tightly-packed and carefully balanced imagery, the arrangement of which leaves not a single area of visual slackness.

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Studio view – Image courtesy Sorry we’re Closed Gallery

Yann Gerstberger at Sorry We’re Closed Gallery

Alice Peillon

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Alice Peillon – Untitled Collage, mixed media, © 2018. Image courtesy of the artist

If we think of collage as a language of disparate, often delicate elements coming together in taut and balanced interactions, then Alice Peillon has achieved over time no small degree of mastery of its vocabulary and grammar. And if we can agree that a language at its most effective can express both the banal and the profound in a single breath, then we can see evidence in Alice’s work of the artist making the same demands of her medium; collage.

Whilst not precisely minimal, Alice’s collages do manage to express a certain expansiveness which hints at things unsaid within the measurements of the surface. This sense of a sparsely occupied space is all the more surprising on such a small scale. Alice’s experience as a painter contributes to the life of these works. Where paint or ink has been applied in her collages it is like the hint of a larger gesture – one which we can imagine continuing beyond the edges of the artwork. Painted marks are so reduced in these works that, where they appear, brushstrokes could be thought of as potential rather than fully formed. Pigment holds a subtle but powerful presence over these delicate surfaces, like the implied consequence of an unrealized act.

Through her unhurried experiments with paper, ink, fragments of photographic images, and painted gestures Alice is adding to the depth of findings by other exponents of the medium, artists such as Anne Ryan and Lyubov Popova.

This text was produced for the artist’s website – www.alicepeillon.com

Alice’s work is currently on show at Winns Gallery, London – artrabbit.com-winnsgallery

200 words #24 / Josephine Halvorson

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Josephine Halvorson / Night Window, February 11-12, 2015, 2015, Oil on linen, 31 x 22 inches, 79 x 56 cm © Josephine Halvorson, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

Representational painting demands that we take it on faith that a subject exists as depicted. Josephine Halvorson paints her subjects on-site and within real-time constraints such as available hours of daylight – or in the case of the series Night Window, which the artist painted during a residency at the French Academy in Rome and which shows the same window on multiple nights – available hours of darkness. Her subjects fill the canvas and convince with every brushstroke.

Peering into the darkness and imagining the world we knew in daylight still there is also an act of faith. The unyielding opacity of Halvorson’s darkened window, with its implied depth, heightens our impulse to catch sight of that world. Looking from painting to painting in the series for traces of difference, we see more discernible depth and detail in the window frame than the endless night beyond.

Halvorson’s subtly different night scenes give the lie to any idea that we register a painted subject solely through the evidence of what is clearly depicted. Just as we can imagine the flaking paintwork on the window frame implied by the artist’s brushwork, so too can we hear the sounds from the darkness outside.

Night Window series on the artist’s website

ART21 / Youtube video of Josephine Halvorson making a painting

Josephine Halvorson at Sikkema Jenkins

Works from the series currently on view – The Lure of the Dark at MASS MoCA

 

 

Erika Verzutti – Ex Gurus @ Andrew Kreps Gallery / March 3 to 31, 2018

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Erika Verzutti – Homeopatia, 2018 Bronze, oil and acrylic paint 40 3/16 x 32 11/16 x 2 3/4 in (102 x 83 x 7 cm) Unique edition of 3. Image courtesy of the Artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, Photo: Everton Ballardin

When I wrote the very first article for this website in December 2015, about Brazilian artist Erica Verzutti’s show at Alison Jacques London, I felt more inclined to refer to her as a painter than a sculptor. (Click here for the 2015 article) At the time I was struck by Verzutti’s use of bronze to create deceptively simple panels, any one of which could quite possibly have been produced with less effort in less permanent material. Added to the pleasant surprise of discovering that these panels were bronze was the willful irreverence the artist had shown towards that very medium by adding patches of acrylic paint here and there. The cheapening plastic dullness of acrylic served in this case only to strengthen the effect of bronze being used in such an unusual context, as a kind of surrogate for canvas. Verzutti’s confident handling of material, no small measure of humour, plus a gift for distilling complex questions of perception to produce irresistible objects of beauty, combined to deliver what I considered to be one of the best exhibitions of painting I had seen in recent years. And the question of whether Verzutti’s work is more painting than sculpture remains as delightfully infuriating in the artist’s most recent show – Ex Gurus – at Andrew Kreps as it was in her 2015 show in London.

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Erika Verzutti – Oblique Strategies, 2016 Papier-mâché and wax 21 1/16 x 26 x 3 1/2 in (53.5 x 66 x 9 cm) Image courtesy of the Artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, Photo: Everton Ballardin

In Ex Gurus we see the same deft associations of material (bronze, paint, papier mâché, wax, clay, and stones) with subject matter – although the artist’s subject matter can often appear to operate in the service of the material. In Ex Gurus, as in Two Eyes Two Mouths – the title of her 2015 London show – I hesitate to refer to Verzutti’s conceptual material as subject matter but rather as a starting point. The concept is often a self-contained conceit on which the artist riffs with enviable ease with her physical material. One of the neatest examples from the 2015 show is a two-part painted bronze entitled The Dress. Two more or less identical bronze casts hang side by side, one gold, one black. The gold cast is streaked with white acrylic paint, the black cast streaked in its corresponding sections with blue. The identically distressed and chiselled surfaces of the bronzes mean that the streaks of paint look like a rubbing is being taken from two rocks. For anyone who remembers the visual paradox which was trending on social media at the time about a dress which appeared to two groups of viewers as alternately white and gold or black and blue, the spark of recognition and humour is immediate.

While the artist tells us that the subject matter of Ex Gurus is more personal – taking ideas from various “…immaterial things: astrology, homeopathy, feng shui, positive thinking.” and that the body of work in the exhibition “…started as a digression on synaesthesia, on the translation between senses.” – she has managed to maintain the same tight control over subjects with such potentially rampant humorous possibilities and created a series of superbly balanced works.

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Erika Verzutti Pilates, 2018 Bronze, oil and acrylic paint 48 x 40 3/16 x 4 3/4 in (122 x 102 x 12 cm) Edition 1 of 3, with 2 APs. Image courtesy of the Artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, Photo: Everton Ballardin

There is never too much attempted in any single piece. Where a bronze has been left unpainted, it is because to have added more to the surface would likely have suggested that the sculptural component of the work on its own was not strong enough. Conversely, where paint has been added, as in the neatly arranged depressions on the surface of Homeopatia, it is only because these brightly coloured additions sit in clear distinction to the base on which they rest. In this case the addition of painted elements is governed by the availability of areas on the bronze surface on which paint can rest without losing its essence as just that – paint.

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Installation view of Erika Verzutti – Ex Gurus. Image courtesy of the Artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, 2018. Photo: Dawn Blackman

And yet almost every visible aspect of the work speaks of sculpture and rough manipulation of material. Surfaces are pockmarked, slashed, gouged, and essentially duffed up. So, what is it about these panels that identifies them more as paintings than sculptures? And if we want to see them as painting entirely, then is it the evidence of a kind of crudely-worked clay form which has been manipulated just prior to the memorializing bronze casting stage which keeps dragging our thoughts back to sculpture, or is it simply the shock of the bronze itself?

A clue to the oscillating effect between painting and sculpture in Verzutti’s work lies in the relative segregation of all the individual elements of the work and their casual, but never contaminating, interaction. One of Verzutti’s talents is to be able to take otherwise irreconcilable components and distil them down to their essence so as to enable them to operate together. Sculpture here is represented by bronze, just as painting is invoked more than explored through the artist’s spare application of paint. And the third, and no more or less significant component – the conceptual spark – likewise lingers over the work as it develops physically, in the end becoming an intangible participant in the whole.

Ex Gurus at Andrew Kreps, New York

Two Eyes Two Mouths at Alison Jacques, London

200 words #21 / Louise Fishman

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Louise Fishman, A LITTLE RAMBLE  2017, Oil on linen, 70 x 90 inches, 177.8 x 228.6 centimeters. Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York.

By the time Louise Fishman took her first painting class in 1956, the same year Jackson Pollock died, Abstract Expressionism was already in decline. Retrospectively, Fishman has been spoken of as belonging to this movement, if only by way of a spiritual affiliation rather than as having played a part in its formation. In fact, had Fishman been a true contemporary of the main players in Ab Ex, it is unlikely still that she would have engaged with them to any great extent. She has been, by her own admission, a loner when it has come to creating alliances and nurturing relationships within the artworld. For such a solitary activity as painting this is perhaps no disadvantage. 

Fishman’s canvases are packed tight with contemporary riffs on Ab Ex – the sweep and drag of the brush, or whatever other implement the artist employs, leaving on the canvas the unmediated imprint of a super-sized gesture. If this sounds unsubtle, then the effect within each of Fishman’s canvases is elegant and controlled. The artist’s stated intention “…always, was to not repeat a painting”. The implied grid in each painting however, upon which the painted marks proliferate, allows a remarkably consistent voice to emerge.

Louise Fishman at Cheim & Read, New York

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