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LOUISE FISHMAN: always stand ajar
2nd Floor Gallery, April 10 - June 27, 2025

LOUISE FISHMAN: always stand ajar: 2nd Floor Gallery

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    Online exhibition catalogue:

    Van Doren Waxter is delighted to announce LOUISE FISHMAN: always stand ajar, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by the venerable American painter organized with the Louise Fishman Foundation. This is the gallery’s first exhibition of the artist since the announcement of representation in 2024. Accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog that includes an essay by poet Nathan Kernan, this exhibition highlights Fishman’s works titled after Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens’ poems and the artist’s long-standing curiosity about the synthesis of paintings and written language.
     
    Over six decades, Louise Fishman dedicated her career to the pursuit of original, complex, and sincere imagery. As painter Amy Sillman wrote, Fishman was “a serious-ass painter” who held herself to the highest standard of experiment and self-reflection in her studio, tackling each painting with the fullest intention to connect with the surface, the paint, and the movement of her body. Alongside her rigorous and disciplined studio practice, Fishman nurtured friendships with writers and activists such as Bertha Harris, Jill Johnston, and Esther Newton, who created pioneering works in lesbian and queer studies which informed the multifariousness of Fishman’s identity as an artist. While Fishman resonated with the gestural and geometric language of abstract painting, she persistently challenged the boundaries of Abstract Expressionism and averted the disposition towards the removal of personhood in the movement. She maintained consciousness of her state of being, in her own words, “a working-class Jewish Lesbian” and of the impossibility of separating the paintings from her greater experience as a human. Fishman’s energetic yet precisely organized brushstrokes are an advertent extension of her athleticism, caring hands, and earnest inquiry into the mystery of what makes a painting.
     
    The exhibition showcases Fishman’s refined and magisterial works from the final twenty years of her life, which she titled after phrases from poems by American poets Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens. She was first introduced to poetry by her paternal aunt, Razel Kapustin, who was also a painter. During her time at Tyler School of Fine Arts, Fishman learned from poet Gerald Stern, with whom she became lifelong friends. She took inspiration from the works of poets, as Grace Hartigan did with Frank O’Hara and Jane Freilicher with John Ashbery. Intuitively and profoundly, Fishman understood the pictorial roots of language and the parallel between text and brushstroke, the legible and illegible.
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  • Events
    • detail of a painting

      Poetry Reading

      Marcella Durand and Vincent Katz May 29, 2025
    • detail of a painting

      Exhibition Walk Though

      Isabelle Dervaux and Andrew Suggs June 12, 2025
    • detail of a painting

      Poetry Reading

      Joan Larkin and Elaine Sexton June 26, 2025
  • Works
    • gestural abstract painting
      Louise Fishman, Hymn of the Rock, 2013
    • gestural abstract painting
      Louise Fishman, Loose The Flood, 2009
    • gestural abstract painting
      Louise Fishman, My Final Inch, 2009
    • gestural abstract painting
      Louise Fishman, Paragraphs of Wind, 2008
    • gestural abstract drawing
      Louise Fishman, UNTITLED, 2008
    • Louise Fishman, Glitter of a Being, 2005
      Louise Fishman, Glitter of a Being, 2005
    • gestural abstract painting
      Louise Fishman, And Yet, And Yet, 2005
    • gestural abstract painting
      Louise Fishman, Green in The Body, 2004
    • gestural abstract painting
      Louise Fishman, Blue Friends in Shadows, 2004
    • gestural abstract painting
      Louise Fishman, Essential Shadow, 2003
    • gestural abstract painting
      Louise Fishman, The Crust of Shape, 2003
    • Louise Fishman, UNTITLED, 2002
      Louise Fishman, UNTITLED, 2002
    • gestural abstract drawing
      Louise Fishman, UNTITLED, 2002
    • gestural abstract drawing
      Louise Fishman, UNTITLED, 2000
  • Installation Shots
    Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Vdw Fishmanshow Apr25 006
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    Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Vdw Fishmanshow Apr25 012
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    Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Vdw Fishmanshow Apr25 013
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  • Publications
    • Louise Fishman

      Louise Fishman

      always stand ajar Nathan Kernan, 2025
      Softcover 45 pages
      ISBN: 979-8-9899971-2-1
      Read more
  • News

    No news items are available relating to this exhibition.

  • Video
  • Artist
    • Louise Fishman

      Louise Fishman

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