Beverly Fishman, DOSE, Curated by Nick Cave: Cue Art Foundation

CUE Art Foundation is pleased to present DOSE, an exhibition of paintings by Beverly Fishman, curated by artist Nick Cave. The exhibition is comprised of a series of luminescent, geometric forms that resemble the shapes of common pharmaceuticals. Straddling the line between sculpture and post-painterly abstraction, Fishman’s optically intense work functions as an avenue for social critique, probing the pharmaceutical industry’s aesthetic decisions and branding strategies.

Fishman has executed many of these pieces on a monumental scale. Finished in glossy sheens, their beveled edges throw fluorescent reflections onto the gallery walls. Her atmospheric pigments test depth in a three-dimensional space, deconstructing the illusion of color as a flat phenomenon, and evoking the corporate iconography of drug manufacturers.  

Nick Cave notes: “Narcotic Euphoria” is the best way to describe Beverly Fishman’s newest body of work. It is a chromium “call-to-arms” delivered with conversely sinister subtlety. It engages with the legacies of Frank Stella, Gary Lang, and Peter Max, all post Joseph Albers, who brought a hard edge to painting and exploited color to tap into an affective and human motivational state. But in this case, Fishman takes all that happens up in the viewer’s head and envelops the heart and pushes it through the entire nervous system. This exhibition uses the familiar, pharmaceutical shaped, and multi-faceted forms of "the daily dose" as the body for her work, so that her deceptively logical and internally vetted color combinations can “sound off” as the voice. Her masterful and continually shifting use of contrasts—color, shape, and scale—define the spaces, both positive and negative, that seduce and induce the viewer into insensible understandings of themselves and the world’s exertion upon them.

Beverly Fishman received her BFA from Philadelphia College of Art, and her MFA from Yale University. Since 2000, she has presented over three-dozen one-person exhibitions at galleries in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Thessaloniki, Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and Detroit. She has also exhibited at the Chrysler Museum, the Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts; Borusan Contemporary; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Weatherspoon Art Museum; The Toledo Museum of Art; and the Columbus Museum of Art. Ms. Fishman has been awarded numerous honors including the Toledo Museum of Art’s Guest Artist Pavilion Project; the Hassam, Speicher, Betts, and Symons Purchase Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; a Guggenheim Fellowship Award; a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award; a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant; an Artist Space Grant; and two Ford Foundation Grants.

Her work has been reviewed in numerous art magazines, newspapers, and scholarly publications, including The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Artforum, Huffington Post, Modern Painters, Artnet Magazine, Wallpaper*, GLASS Quarterly, NY Arts Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Art in America. Barbara Maria Stafford wrote about her work in Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images, as did Joe Houston in Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s.
 
Her work may be found in many public collections including the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the Chrysler Museum, the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, The Toledo Museum of Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, Borusan Contemporary, the Cranbrook Art Museum, the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art, the Pizzuti Collection, and the U.S. Consulate General in Istanbul. Her work is also included in the corporate collections of Progressive Art Collection, DaimlerChrysler Corporation, Hallmark Art Collection, Compuware, UBS Financial Services Inc., Cantor Fitzgerald, and Prudential Insurance Company of America, among others.

She is Artist-in-Residence and Head of Painting, at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. 

Curator Nick Cave is a Messenger, Artist and Educator working between the visual and performing arts through a wide range of mediums inclusive of sculpture, installation, video, sound, and performance. His solo exhibitions have expanded globally from the United States through France, Africa, Denmark, Asia, South America, and the Caribbean. He has been described as a Renaissance artist and says of himself "I have found my middle and now ... working toward what I am leaving behind." Cave received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and is currently the Stephanie and Bill Sick Professor of Fashion, Body, and Garment at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has earned many other major awards and honors, most recently receiving the U.S. Department of State International Medal of Arts award.