Nº2 Louise Fishman - Venice Watercolours 2011 - 2013 by Gallery Nosco

LOUISE FISHMAN VENICE WATERCOLOURS 2011 - 2013

DECEMBER 2014

LOUISE FISHMAN VENICE WATERCOLOURS 2011 - 2013

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LOUISE FISHMAN VENICE WATERCOLOURS 2011 - 2013 ORGANIZED IN COLLABORATION WITH SIMON WATSON TEXT AND CURATORIAL BY SUZANA DIAMOND

We are pleased to announce an exhibition of watercolours by New York abstract painter Louise Fishman. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in the UK, uniting works created during the artist’s residency at the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy. While living in Venice, Fishman plunged into an exhilarating exploration of watercolour as a medium. Profoundly inspired by the ebb and flow of the surroundings, Fishman took thousands of photographs, working vigorously between a stream of open drawings. The residency in Venice marked a dynamic shift in the artist’s creative process, and the fruit of Fishman’s two trips to the city is a phenomenal body of watercolours and sketchbooks from the artist’s private collection, to be shown in London for the very first time this December. The resulting compositions resonate with the theatricality and drama of an Italian opera, while evoking the lightweight atmosphere of Venice; the luminosity and color of its sky, water and glass. Fishman’s signature formal elements - calligraphy, gesture and grid - find a new light amongst found papers, bleeds, scratches, drips, erasures, fingerprints and other physical interventions. A myriad of influences reveal themselves, from the artist’s life-long admiration of Titian and Tintoretto, to later influences by Giorgione and Veronese. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1939, Fishman’s works are deeply impacted by cultural, political and emotional experiences. Over the past five decades, Fishman has re-invented and expanded approaches to abstract painting, and continues to reframe conventions through various formal and material investigations. In her own words, Fishman is “examining our histories and moving forward, just making the best paintings I can make, that’s what I do. That, and being in love.” One of the last direct descendents from a great lineage of American abstract painters (Franz Kline, Willem De Kooning, Joan Mitchell) Fishman – who first exhibited in 1963, is the subject of two comprehensive retrospectives scheduled for 2016, at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York (April 3rd - July 21st, 2016) and The ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art) at the University of Pennsylvania (April 20 - August 16, 2016).

Louise Fishman’s Venice watercolours are the subject of the exhibition that celebrates and sheds a new light on the artist’s relentless commitment to the language, ethos and expressive power of abstraction. Though involved in a contemporary context, Fishman’s Venice watercolours invigorate a vivid dialogue with art history and the past. The very roots of the artist’s gesture, surface and light, lie in the artist’s deep understanding of art historical tradition. Growing up in a family of artists and exposed to art from an early age, the history of painting undoubtedly had a profound impact on Fishman’s practice. In Italy, surrounded by works of the Old Masters, the artist re-encountered some of the paintings she most admired, including Titian’s ‘Assumption of the Virgin Mary’ and ‘The Annunciation’, also drawing inspiration from the works by Giorgione, Tintoretto and Veronese. These artistic influences are combined, for instance, in Fishman’s use of the solemn and somber, allover darkness of Goya, interjected by luminous flecks of white, like bolts in an apocalyptic scene by El Greco, or a heavenly light pouring from the celestial grandness of a Titian sky; in the themes of crucifixion and ascension, evoked in the upward and outward movement of the artist’s brushstrokes; or in Fishman’s masterful use of colour, such as deep blues and reds, to represent blood and martyrdom. In the Venice watercolours, gestures dart against the stark paper, evoking Franz Kline’s black and white paintings; ruddy reds of Chaim Soutine emerge from fields and storms of colour; swirls of strokes and drips resemble those of Jackson Pollock; and the liberating activity of brushstrokes is a nod to Willem De Kooning. Calligraphy, the language of the hand and the Zen aesthetic are evidenced as continuous reference points for Fishman and the influence of Chinese Art is markedly present, with script acting as a threshold and chamber of light. The resulting watercolours throb with movement, energy and light, like the tides that swell and subside in the Venetian canals. Past traditions and historical influences are complemented by the artist’s personal experiences: “every time I go somewhere, I notice something visual, and it ends up ultimately in the work,” says Fishman. The artist’s residencies around the world resulted in a powerful response to her surroundings. Prior to Venice, as a result of a trip to Eastern Europe, Auschwitz and Terezin in 1988, the artist deeply explored themes of spirituality, Jewish identity and continuity. Fishman began to use muted colours and a ghostly network of black lines and grids, resonating the underlying architectural structures of walls, doors and windows. The notion of the Grid is entirely reframed as a form of meditation, rather than a compositional device. The intense experience of visiting concentration camps also informed Fishman’s use of spare, brooding dark forms and matte surfaces. Meaning and symbolic charge in these shapes and forms bring the artist’s works closer to that of the Old Masters.

Unlike Fishman’s paintings from earlier decades, which seemed to lock up light, the watercolours are more loose and free, opening up the pictorial space to radiate the light and colour in Venice. Fishman absorbs the drama and emotional resonance of the floating city and channels her raw experiences and environment into the works. At times, the luscious blues evoke the Lapis Lazuli of the Virgin Mary, the iridescent hue of a Murano vase or the ultramarine and phthalo of the Venetian water and sky. In other compositions, nocturnal blues, pale yellow-greens and purples resemble the qualities of moonlight. The shimmer and glinted glow of reflected light in the water or on the buildings occasionally break subdued and muffled tones, while soft colour fields, gradients and patchworks of broad washes beautifully render diffused light. Fishman’s Venice watercolours are also enriched with an unusual texture, alluding to the artist’s method of layering paint in a buildup of the surface. Thick dashes and blocks of modulated colour seem to bubble up or imbibe the paper, like grit or tar on cobblestone, or moss on the walls of canals. The artist experiments with different tools, techniques (like collage) and materials (such as pencil shavings and glue) which protrude from the support. Physical interventions like ripping and scratching, disrupt and alter the surface. The resulting sculptural abstractions, much like the Chinese scholar rocks the artist collects, allude to a sublime sense of permanence, amidst the fluidity representing change. Far ashore from the male-dominated manner, tradition and aesthetics of the Abstract Expressionists, Fishman’s watercolours achieve a style of abstraction and aesthetic of their own, to be considered now from a new perspective. The Venice works still contain the expressive power, raw emotive force, vitality and struggle that vibrantly animate the surfaces of the artist’s renowned large canvases. As much condensed into these intimate watercolours are abstraction’s emotional and psychological charges. Yet under a more contemporary lens, traditional forms dissolve and become unanchored and indiscernible, allowing for the intensity of the artist’s feelings to flourish. It is in Venice, after all, that the artist falls in love and exudes a new romantic sensibility and exuberance, manifested in a more lightened and airy form of expression. Past and present experiences flow freely and burst into the ‘Schiuma del Mare’ - the ebullience of passion and life itself.

Suzana Diamond

Untitled /2013