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 Solo Exhibition

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