Grand Slam

Created two decades into her long career, Grand Slam, a possible reference to either the sport of tennis or to the artist’s own athleticism, is indicative of Fishman’s work from the mid-1980s. The work comprises successive layers of paint that are alternately applied and removed, added and subtracted, resulting in a rich, variegated, tactile surface. Its composition consists of a patchwork of interlocking brushstrokes, some long and sweeping, others relatively short and staccato, as in the center of the canvas, where a stack of horizontal marks resides, the product of the artist pulling an implement, perhaps a narrow palette knife, across and through wet paint. As they do here, traces of the artist’s labor and the movement of her arm across the canvas remain visible throughout, a nod, perhaps, to Fishman’s study of Italian Old Master painting, whose physicality drew her attention.[1] The artist’s palette tends towards somber tones: browns, blacks, and grays brightened with occasional passages of white, blue, and green. A sense of drama and theatricality pervades the painting, thanks to the collision of multi-directional strokes.

In its appearance of spontaneity, Grand Slam exemplifies the artist’s longstanding commitment to gestural abstraction. As Fishman wrote in 1982, "I guess I’ve always thought of myself as an Expressionist painter. I associate it with a certain kind of passion and a certain kind of marking. A kind of immediacy. Actually, my paintings take months and months to put together. I paint in layers and scrape and repaint, but the end result has a feeling of immediacy that I associate with Soutine or van Gogh."[2] Chaïm Soutine and Vincent van Gogh, likewise Paul Cézanne, were indeed early sources of inspiration for Fishman, who first encountered their work while studying in Philadelphia, where she was born and raised into a family whose Jewish identity remained important to her practice. Gradually, the artist came to also admire the Abstract Expressionists and develop an interest in Chinese calligraphy, paralleling her engagement with Hebrew script writing. After moving to New York City in 1965, Fishman began to adapt her practice, experimenting with procedural and process-based art, incorporating minimalist grids into her compositions as well. Radicalized by the Vietnam War and the social justice movements in the 1960s and 1970s, Fishman participated actively in both feminist and queer liberation circles, whose anger and frustration she challenged into her Angry Paintings of the 1970s, her sole experiment with language-based art. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Fishman would return to her roots, so to speak, and commit herself to abstract paintings in oil on canvas like Grand Slam, which communicates in more oblique form the breadth of her references, interests, and commitments.

[1] Sharon L. Butler, "Louise Fishman with Sharon Butler," The Brooklyn Rail, October 2012.

[2] Louise Fishman, untitled statement in Carter Ratcliff, Hayden Herrera, Sarah McFadden, and Joan Simon, "Expressionism Today: An Artists’ Symposium," Art in America 70, no. 11 (December 1982), p. 66.