This luminescent relief by Beverly Fishman presents as two geometric forms, conjoined like a mirror image, yet opposite in their textures and peripheral colors. The title, Untitled (Double Pain), refers to Fishman’s method of mobilizing pharmaceutical forms as the basis for her abstract compositions. Made with urethane automotive paint and medium-density fiberboard (MDF), Fishman’s highly polished Pill Reliefs engage the surrounding spaces with reflected color and light. In this piece, pain pills have morphed into visual stimulants packed with both aesthetic and allegorical content.

Fishman is directly referencing the transformative power of pharmaceuticals and the transcendent potential of visual art with her work, suggesting the ways people have come to use both as an avenue through which to seek the sublime. The color-and-light-filled forms evoke the metaphysical theories and aesthetic strategies of the Light and Space Movement, as the missing pieces activate emptiness, exploring the creative potential of voids and raising questions about what truly is the subject of the work.

Fishman is an Anonymous Was A Woman Award Winner, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, and National Endowment for the Arts Grantee. Her solo exhibition FEELS LIKE LOVE opens in April at Kavi Gupta in Chicago.

Recent major exhibitions of her work include Recovery, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI, USA; I Dream of Sleep, Miles McEnery, New York, NY, USA; Double Edged: Geometric Abstraction Then and Now, curated by Dr. Emily Stamey, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC, USA; DOSE, curated by Nick Cave, CUE Art Foundation, New York, NY, USA; Pill Spill, Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, MI, USA; and Beverly Fishman: In Sickness and in Health, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA, USA. Work by Fishman is included in the collections of the MacArthur Foundation, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Chrysler Museum of Art, and many others.