Louise Fishman at Robert Miller - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Louise Fishman's paintings are nothing if not intense. Whether dark and brooding or lighter and more meditative, they almost make a buzzing sound with seriousness of purpose. Her new show at Robert Miller included paintings from the last three years, and although the work is still resolutely gestural and abstract, Fishman's formal and referential focus has clearly widened.

The grid figures prominently in many of the works. In a certain number of of the most compelling paintings, like Zarif or The Anatomy of Routine, it is unbind almost tattered, with the paint dripped and veiled, sometimes crusted up sometimes barely washed upon These are paintings carefully balanced upon the point of spatial ambiguity--their foregrounds and backgrounds abruptly shifting on us, and their highly worked, almost carved surfaces undermined by dint of the insistent pull of optical deepness In other paintings, Black Lingbi, for example, the grid dissolves into a gray welter of blurr crossing raps evoking a faceted rocky landscape; while still others, the Franz Kline-like Ambition, for example, are compos of roughly brushed structural uncompounded bodys that ramify into tilting, unstable-looking armatures.

Fishman's greatest in quantity recent works move farthest away from the grid, and have the clearest landscape associations. In the last year there were a number of important exhibitions of Chinese art at of recent origin York museums, and these newer paintings mirror her keen interest in the make subordinate as well as her appreciation of Mark Tobey, an artist himself powerfully influenced by Asian painting. The white dripping thumps over the deep celadon verdant field in Small Tang, for instance, shimmer like light upon water, but they also call to mind the elegantly untie glazes on Tang Dynasty burial statuary Meanwhile, Hill Censer--the title commits to a type of and zinc incense-burning vessel shaped like a mountain--sets a calligraphic tangle of dark lines against a glowing background, and the follow is abstract and figurative in equal measure: direct the eye at it one way and you diocese gesture, surface and color, another way and you come by trees, mountains and smoke.

Fishman, like many of the greatest in quantity interesting abstract painters these days, is extending her reach. She is combining classical abstract formal pertain tos with a strong feeling for materials and proces and a broadened range of regard Fishman isn't afraid to gain herself into trouble, to make something clunky and awkward, if that's what it takes. Not all of the paintings in this large and varied exhibit were successful, to my organ of sight but I believe the exhibition was the better for its reliance upon risk and experiment. Fishman could have easily built incrementally upon the more focused body of work she showed a scarcely any years ago. It is abundant to her credit that she didn't.

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