Material imperatives - exhibits of Louise Fishman's paintings at the Morris Gallery of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Temple Gallery and Temple University's Tyler Gallery; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

While the direct the eye of Louise Fishman's paintings has continued to develop her tough, no-frills approach to abstraction has remained constant above several decades. Even though her work was loosely identified with Pattern painting in the late 1970 and Neo-Expressionism in the 1980 it has always stood somewhat apart from any discernible motion sustained instead by its possess imperatives. Recently she seems to have revolveed yet another corner in her career, with equal reason it was particularly instructive this past season to diocese what amounted to an ad hoe retrospective of her work - a trio of present to views organized in Philadelphia, the city where she was born and grew up

Seven large paintings from the last eight years were showcased at the Morris Gallery of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Dec 15 1992-Jan. 31 1993) Eighteen smaller paintings, dating from as far back as the early '80 were upon view at the Temple Gallery, and above 100 drawings and experimental works, in mixed mediums were hordeed into Temple University's Tyler Gallery (both Dec 9 1992-Jan. 15 1993) The Tyler display was drawn from two periods, 1971-74 and 1990-92 Works in rubber, latex, canvas and fix cardboard made up the earlier group; painted artists, works and layered tracing-paper works compos the later one

The earliest pieces at Tyler documented Fishman's turning away from the grid-based painting to which she had been committed in the 1960 and her later engagement with the example of Eva Hesse, who had died in 1970 at age 34 (Fishman was a hardly any years younger). An untitled work from 1971 consisting of longitudinal dimensionss of yellowed parchment-like rubber sewn together with black thread, is characteristic of this period in its clear liability to Hesse's process-based method.

by and by however, Fishman began to overlay her unorthodox surfaces with paint, as in the brake growth of brushwork on the small rubber panels of an untitled triptych she complet in 1973 Also from that year, and coming on the outside of the emotional matrix of a feminist consciousness-raising assemblage shi had co-founded, are "The Angry Paintings," a kind of encyclopedia of female rage. With slashing acrylic raps each of these works upon paper essays an abstract feeling-portrait of a woman Fishman knows or admires), Angry Louise (a self-portrait), Angry Harmony (Hammond), Angry Nancy (Spero) and in like manner on., more than 20 artists, writers, feminists and other famous women were exhibited in this show.

In the nearest decade (after a brief excursion into Pattern painting, unrepresent here) that efficiency seemed to release into works of an astonishing physicality and vigor; their signature marks were thick swabs of paint pushed around with palette knife or trowel. I contemplation of [the paint] like clay," Fishman has said. "I was trying to make paintings that felt like objects"[1] The large works Cinnabar and Malachite (1986) and Grand Slam (1985) the one and the other of which were on view at the Academy, are representative of this period, as are similar small works as Bashert (1982) a blunt blackened pictogram surrounded by thickly scumbl gray.

The sum of two units larger paintings achieve some pictorial deepness through the overlay of hefty bands and sweeps of paint. The colors - vulgarly bright r and green-blue in Cinnabar and Malachite, and miry grays and reds in Grand Slam - strike one as being utterly liberated from any desire to please. In all these works, there is a bashert Cyiddish for "inevitable") quality to the way the underlayers and foreground action s come screeching to a just-right halt at the point of each painting's completion.

A major shift in Fishman's painting was accelerated through a 1988 trip to Central Europe specifically to the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Terezin, with a Holocaust-survivor friend. Fishman's search for a fresh language to encompass the epic horror of this piece of her be in possession of Jewish heritage led her to overhaul her way of working. Of this period, she has said, I extremityed to skim off all the fat from my painting,"[2] a annotate which in this context bears additional suggestions of ritual fasting. She abandoned the thick slabs of color and instead began building up layers with numerous thin washes, ofttimes rubbed down and painted above again.

The ashen feeling of these color washes is literal, allowing subtle. Fishman had returned from her European trip with a fistful of ashes, cremated human remains gathered from the silt in the memorial Pond of Living Ashes in Aischwitz. This she mixed, along with a small amount of beeswax, into the paint used in this series. The darker, softer and vastly slower surfaces that ariseed are exemplified in Sargenes (1988) a work whose floating rectangular veils of gray yield to a slight underglow of fulvous only in a single, lower quadrant. With its quietly shifting equilibrium among planes and profunditys darkness and light, this work inescapably recalls Rothko

The many small paintings of this Remembrance and Renewal, series, shown at the fane Gallery, demonstrate that intimate scale is the greenhouse, as it were, in which Fishman exhibits her introspective concerns. Each work allows a single gesturing to explore an often uninflected vein In the radically simplified Memorial volume for instance, a dark path divide [i]or[/i] sever s through a lightly washed plane of grayed virid and orange, like the long tray formed by the binding between a book's uncloseed pages. Spidery tracks of dripped turpentine precipitate around the path like tears.