The radiating colors of this relief by Beverly Fishman might evoke neon lights or the glow of an emergency vehicle on a run—hardly what anyone would want to think about when trying to sleep. Appropriately titled Untitled (Insomnia), the work belongs to Fishman’s Pill Relief series, which mobilizes pharmaceutical forms as the basis for luminescent abstract compositions. The empty space on the right side of the work creates a void in which color and light is projected from the highly polished surface. Nicknamed Missing Doses, these cut-out forms evoke the metaphysical theories and aesthetic strategies of the Light and Space Movement, activating 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.

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. 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.