Beverly Fishman “Something For The Pain”

Miles McEnery Gallery

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Miles McEnery Gallery presents Something For The Pain, Beverly Fishman’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.

From the outset of a four decade career, Beverly Fishman has centered her work around the body, probing abstract investigations of disease, identity, and medicine. Since 1999, her oeuvre has propelled towards the latter, delving into the promises of pharmaceuticals as the means for a cure.

Fishman positions the sculptural paintings in Something For The Pain within the concept of polypharmacy—the prescription of multiple medicines to one individual. Glowing fluorescent and smooth matte forms correspond to specific pills as Fishman expertly illustrates the measured precision of an individual’s unique prescription. Geometric fragments are stacked into singular compositions; some segments rendered whole and others fractured to imply partial doses. Parenthetical titles pronounce the works to indicate each ailment meant for treatment.

Both welcoming and unsettling, Fishman’s consistent use of urethane paint on wood lures viewers toward her floating structures; their edges bevel towards the wall, reflecting the neon-painted undersides and creating an artificial glow that mimics a physical light. Both her innate sensibility for color and the sheer scale of the works demand attention that further provokes an interrogation surrounding Big Pharma and one’s relationship to the body and its current environment.

“Listening carefully to the world around her, the artist co-opts the language of painting—line, color, form, texture— and compounds it with the art of medicine—diagnosis, management, and sometimes a cure,” writes Rebecca Hart. “A prolific maker, Fishman traces the evolution of medical and pharmacologic discovery, injecting it with personal and cultural content… Aggregating this information as source material for her ongoing exploration, Fishman’s paintings are bellwethers of the effects of industrialized medicine.”

Beverly Fishman (b. 1955, Philadelphia, PA) received her Master of Fine Arts in 1980 from Yale University and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Philadelphia College of Art in 1977. In 2020, Fishman was inducted as a National Academician of the National Academy of Design. She is the recipient of the Anonymous Was A Woman Award; the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Hassam, Speicher, Betts, & Symons Purchase Award; a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Fine Arts; and a Fellowship Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Fishman has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at The Contemporary Dayton, Dayton, OH; Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL; Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI; Walter Storms Galerie, Munich, Germany; Gavlak Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; Library Street Collective, Detroit, MI; Ronchini Gallery, London, United Kingdom; and the CUE Art Foundation, New York, NY, among others.

She has been included in group exhibitions at numerous international institutions including the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, Turkey; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; The Drawing Center, New York, NY; National Academy of Design, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; and White Columns, New York, NY.

Her work may be found in the collections of the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; Eli and Edythe Broad Museum, East Lansing, MI; The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, Houston, TX; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC, and elsewhere.

Fishman lives and works in Detroit, MI.