PHILADELPHIA, PA.- In a career spanning over five decades to date, American painter Louise Fishman has produced an astounding body of work in gestural painting, engaging the materiality of mark making with an enduring passion. Locks Gallery announced its representation of this native Philadelphian.

Both embracing and redefining the aggressively masculine tradition of Abstract Expressionism, [Fishman] has employed its formal language to create large-scale, gestural abstractions that share the physicality, dynamism, and emotional force of that movement while remaining visually poetic and intimate in tone.1

Louise Fishman was born in 1939 in Philadelphia. She earned her BFA in Painting and Printmaking and a BS in Art Education at the Stella Elkins Tyler School of Art in 1963 and completed her MFA in Painting and Printmaking at the University of Illinois in Champaign/Urbana. She then headed directly to New York, where she has lived and worked ever since, along with ten years spent working in her studio in Upstate New York. Fishman’s work is represented in many public collections, including: the National Academy of Art and Design, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg, PA; and many others. She was the recipient of three National Endowment for the Arts grants, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among others. Fishman was included in three Whitney Biennials, 1973, 1987, and 2014. In 2016, the Neuberger Museum of Art organized the artist’s first retrospective, curated by Helaine Posner and accompanied by a monograph. Her full biography is available on the Locks Gallery website.

Locks Gallery looks forward to continuing to develop Fishman’s international profile, beginning with a solo exhibition at the gallery opening in September this year, which will feature recent works.


1 Posner, Helaine. “Louise Fishman: The Energy in the Rectangle,” Louise Fishman, ed. Helaine Posner, DelMonico Books, Prestel, 2016.