Louise Fishman

New York–based artist Louise Fishman (1931–2021) was widely known for her gestural markmaking and atmospheric spaces. This volume presents nine previously unseen paintings from the artist’s foundational years as a student, featuring her early forays into abstraction.

American artist Louise Fishman’s (born 1939) physical and process-driven work reimagines the Abstract Expressionist model into a vehicle for dialogue about history and emotion centered in the artist’s identities as Jewish, feminist and lesbian. Though she is primarily a painter, Fishman has worked with a number of different mediums to create works on paper since the early 1960s. A Question of Emphasis presents a vast selection of these works in a single volume, encompassing collage, oil and wax, thread, acrylic text, ink, charcoal, printmaking, oil stick, watercolor and tempera. Fishman conceives of her works on paper not as studies for later paintings but as discrete pieces of art, generally small- and medium-scale and frequently sculptural and tactile. New writing as well as an interview between Fishman and artist Ulrike Müller accompany a wide selection of works.

“If good painting is what you want to do, then good painting is what you must look at,” New York–based painter Louise Fishman (born 1939) wrote in a 1977 issue of Heresies. “Take what you want and leave the dreck.” Fishman is renowned for her subtractive method of mark-making, which celebrates process and rejects the masculinist impulses of abstract expressionism. She uses scrapers, trowels and traditional brushes to apply and remove dense layers of paint in loose, gestural scores across the canvas. Fishman’s training as a sculptor is visible in the physicality of her paint, which is vigorously applied, indexing her movement about the canvas.

This comprehensive clothbound monograph spans the evolution of Fishman’s practice over the last 60 years of the artist’s extensive oeuvre. The fully illustrated volume includes two newly commissioned essays by Debra Singer and Josephine Halvorson, with republished essays by Aruna D’Souza, Andrew Suggs, Suzan Frecon, Bertha Harris and John Yau.

This publication brings together a characteristically wide-ranging group of new works by painter Louise Fishman (born 1939). The paintings in this volume all appear as spontaneous improvisations upon an implied grid, but vary widely in scale (from 4 x 6 inches to 96 inches wide) and method. Paint is troweled, squeezed from the tube, diluted into a wash, pressed on with a sheet of paper and pulled off. The mediums include oil, watercolor, egg tempera, colored pencil, ink and graphite.

The varied nature of Fishman’s work can be explained by a simple statement from the artist herself: “My intention, always, was to not repeat a painting, was to not repeat aspects of paintings. My intention in painting is to keep discovering and to keep changing.”