The Locks Gallery on Washington Square has recently opened its latest exhibition, a retrospective of prominent Jewish lesbian feminist artist Louise Fishman (1939 – 2021).
A native Philadelphian, Fishman originally aspired to be an athlete but changed her focus to art shortly after graduating high school. She subsequently studied at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art, the Stella Elkins Tyler School of Art, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. After getting her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the University of Illinois, Fishman relocated to New York, where she lived and worked until her death on July 26, 2021. She was 82. Her spouse, Ingrid Nyeboe, said the cause was complications of an ablation, a heart procedure.
During her 60+ year career, Fishman’s work has been acquired for the public collections of some of the most prestigious art institutions in the country, including (among many others) the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburg, Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, and Philadelphia’s own Institute of Contemporary Art.
Fishman has also been profiled or reviewed by many of the country’s highest-profile publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Artforum, and Interview magazine.
The exhibition currently on display at the Locks Gallery is titled “Soliloquy.” It features later works that show Fishman’s style of dynamic yet graceful abstract expressionism in full flower. The works also reflect the influences she experienced during her third and final residency in Venice from 2016 to 2017.
Fishman usually liked to work on a larger scale. There are pieces in “Soliloquy” that measure up to seven feet, which gives the work an almost operatic grandiosity, despite the abstraction. The way Fishman worked sounds almost as dramatic and theatrical as an opera: her paintings were built in layers over an improvised grid structure, over which she would apply paint with trowels and scrapers, along with traditional brushes and, sometimes, her hands.
Fishman’s work cannot exactly be called pretty, but more a struggle with conflicting influences and emotions. In fact, her layers built over rough grid structures with sometimes rough tools suggest a barely controlled chaos.
In a 2016 interview, Fishman tried to explain the tension inherent in her process and influences. “It has always been a problem for my career that I am one, queer, two, a woman, and three, doing plain old abstract paintings. There’s not the subject matter that you see in other lesbian work — subject matter that makes things more accessible and easy to write about.”
That tension is perhaps best exemplified in her piece “Versicle,” with its barely discernible grid with paint streaked chaotically in all directions. Like the rest of the pieces in this show, it does what abstract expressionism does best: it invites the viewer to find his or her personal meaning in the chaos of life, and to join the artist in her journey to reconcile all the disparate aspects of her life.
“Soliloquy” is on display at the Locks Gallery, 600 Washington Square South, through December 23. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. For more information, call 215-629-1000 or visit locksgallery.com/.
