Beverly Fishman: In Sickness and In Health: Chrysler Museum of Art | Norfolk, VA

15 July 2015 - 3 January 2016

Overview

“Critics have compared my work to both post-Pop art and Minimalist styles,” Fishman wrote in her artist’s statement. “I do engage directly with the legacies of these movements, but I pursue an aesthetic that combines abstract form with social and political critique.”

In this case, the critique is aimed at the pharmaceutical industry, from its marketing clout to the limits of its usefulness. This exhibition grows from a series of earlier works she called Pill Spills.

“In each of these works…I treat the museum or gallery space as a living organism by releasing pharmaceuticals into the institution’s interior,” Fishman wrote. “The capsule serves both as an icon and as a vehicle for abstraction, through which changing color and pattern combinations unfold. The glass pills, which cannot dissolve, present multiple paradoxes. How are we to ingest their substances? Are they cure or poison? Can art treat social ills, or is it just a placebo?”

— Curatorial text courtesy the Chrysler Museum