BEVERLY FISHMAN: SOMETHING FOR THE PAIN

“Listening carefully to the world around her, the artist co-opts the language of painting—line, color, form, texture—and compounds it with the art of medicine—diagnosis, management, and sometimes a cure. She is driven to invent new imagery based on the individual shapes found in the PDR [Physician's Desk Reference], stringing or stacking them together. ‘I dream of having work that feels surprising or new,’ she says. Novel shapes and hues combine and appear like an unknown alphabet—twenty-first-century glyphs suggestive of otherworldly characters or formulas. Hers is not an alchemist’s pseudoscience; she’s a pragmatist.”

- Rebecca Hart in "A Prescription"

"To Fishman, the wall is a site that is conditioned and activated by form and color. 'There’s the whole idea of balance,' she says. 'And if you throw the balance off enough, the painting is in motion. It doesn’t rest. It isn’t easy. My color always needs to be off in some way, because I don’t want anyone to settle. . . I make pieces that have what I think of as a kind of imperfection.'"

- Rebecca Hart in "A Prescription"

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

Fishman’s work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at The Contemporary Dayton, Dayton, OH; Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL; Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI; Walter Storms Galerie, Munich, Germany; SOCO Gallery, Charlotte, NC; Gavlak Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; Louis Buhl & Co., Detroit, MI; Library Street Collective, Detroit, MI; Ronchini Gallery, London, United Kingdom; Kravets Wehby Gallery, New York, NY; and CUE Art Foundation, New York, NY.

She has been included in group exhibitions at numerous international institutions including the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, Turkey; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; The Drawing Center, New York, NY; Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, MI; National Academy of Design, New York, NY; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; and White Columns, New York, NY, among others.

Her work may be found in the collections of Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, Turkey; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; Eli and Edythe Broad Museum, East Lansing, MI; MacArthur Foundation Collection, Chicago, IL; Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, Houston, TX; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC, and elsewhere.

Fishman was inducted as a National Academician of the National Academy of Design in 2020. She is the recipient of the Anonymous Was A Woman Award; the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Hassam, Speicher, Betts, & Symons Purchase Award; a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Fine Arts; and a Fellowship Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The artist lives and works in Detroit, MI.