NEW YORK, NY.- Miles McEnery Gallery opened an exhibition of new paintings by Beverly Fishman, on view 8 May - 21 June at 515 West 22nd Street, accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring a text by Meredith Mendelsohn.

For her fourth exhibition with the gallery, and on the occasion of her 70th birthday, Beverly Fishman presents a bold new body of work that expands upon her established practice in unprecedented ways. These latest pieces are more intricate, fluid, and compositionally complex than ever before, reflecting her continuous exploration and ever-expanding artistic vision.

Fishman has spent most of her artistic career investigating the relationship between the body and disease, probing at the pharmaceutical promise of a costly “cure.” In her pursuit of these questions, she has developed a distinct visual vocabulary of sculptural wall reliefs that combine glowing fluorescent and smooth matte forms, each geometric fragment representing a medicinal dose. Sleek and collage-like, these compositions mimic the precision of individualized prescriptions. In this new body of work, Fishman straddles a line between calculated precision and spontaneity. Though titled, Equilibrium, these new compositions subtly subvert the term—they appear casually sorted, scattered like pills into an open palm. This tension between balance and chaos is precisely where Fishman’s mastery lies; their effortless harmony is a result of her exacting control and intention.

With a Finish Fetish luster, their polished surfaces enhance the seductive promise of relief—forming an alluring visual cocktail that embodies both remedy and reliance.These visual motifs echo principles of High Modernist design, but rather than merely reference them, Fishman exaggerates them to a point of mechanistic perfection such that they unravel their own ideals, underscoring the dangerous extremes of our pharmaceutical system—a force that can create new ideals of bodily perfection, render deviation as ailment, and invent solutions for a fee.

Meredith Mendelsohn notes that Fishman’s work “seems incredibly relevant, with our massive aging population, growing number of adolescents on mind-altering medications, and radical changes to healthcare. But Fishman doesn’t want to get bogged down in the details. ‘I just want my work to start a conversation that doesn’t have a didactic end, to provide an experience that makes you want to stay long enough to think,’ she says. And that she has. Her growing body of geometric abstractions not only catapult a pressing cultural reality to the forefront of our consciousness, but they are incredibly fulfilling to look at. The placebo effect is real.”

Beverly Fishman (b. 1955 in Philadelphia, PA) received her Master of Fine Arts in 1980 from Yale University and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Philadelphia College of Art in 1977.

Fishman’s work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at CUE Art Foundation, New York, NY; Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI; Gavlak Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL; KOTARO NUKAGA, Tokyo, Japan; Kravets Wehby Gallery, New York, NY; Library Street Collective, Detroit, MI; Louis Buhl & Co., Detroit, MI; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; Ronchini Gallery, London, United Kingdom; SOCO Gallery, Charlotte, NC; The Contemporary Dayton, Dayton, OH; and Walter Storms Galerie, Munich, Germany.

She has been included in group exhibitions at numerous international institutions including the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, Turkey; Circulo de Bessa Artes, Madrid, Spain; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, MI; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; National Academy of Design, New York, NY; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; The Drawing Center, New York, NY; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; and White Columns, New York, NY, among others.

Her work may be found in the collections of Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, Turkey; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; Eli and Edythe Broad Museum, East Lansing, MI; MacArthur Foundation Collection, Chicago, IL; Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, Houston, TX; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC, and elsewhere.

Fishman was inducted as a National Academician of the National Academy of Design in 2020. She is the recipient of the Anonymous Was A Woman Award; the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Hassam, Speicher, Betts, & Symons Purchase Award; a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Fine Arts; and a Fellowship Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The artist lives and works in Detroit, MI.