Louise Fishman

Louise Fishman is a 544-page monograph on the New York painter Louise Fishman, tracing about sixty years of her abstract painting through essays by eight writers, Fishman among them.

Karma listed it as the publication for her 2020 exhibition Ballin’ the Jack. Debra Singer and Josephine Halvorson wrote new essays for it. Texts by Aruna D’Souza, Andrew Suggs, Suzan Frecon, Bertha Harris and John Yau are reprinted, and Fishman adds a text of her own. It is a clothbound hardcover of about 7½ by 9¼ inches, and the distributor’s listing counts 350 color images.

Fishman was born in Philadelphia in 1939 and died in New York in 2021. She trained as a sculptor, and that shows in paintings built from dense layers of paint that she applied and then scraped back, in loose gestural scores that often recall the grid. In a 1977 issue of Heresies she wrote, “If good painting is what you want to do, then good painting is what you must look at.” She held a Guggenheim Fellowship in painting in 1979, and her work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others.