Kavi Gupta is pleased to present Beverly Fishman and Alison Gass in Conversation at our 219 N. Elizabeth Street location in conjunction with Fishman’s solo exhibition “CHEMICAL SUBLIME”.

The conversation will be followed by a light cocktail reception.

About Beverly:

Beverly Fishman is a multi-disciplined artist whose provocative, visually electrifying oeuvre positions her as an authoritatively contemporary aesthetic voice.

Combining the handmade with the industrial, Fishman employs a variety of techniques to explore technological, scientific, and biological systems of perception and representation, instigating constructive conversations about the ways people see their bodies and minds, and construct their identities. Her most illustrious bodies of work engage with the visual language of the medical industrial complex. For example, her highly-polished Pill reliefs utilize iconic pharmaceutical forms as the basis for seemingly abstract compositions that radiate with color. Her brilliantly complex Dividose paintings appropriate the unsettling, multilayered, linear aesthetic of medical imaging technologies such as EEG and EKG machines, provoking levels of optical fascination capable of eliciting physiological responses from viewers.

Though seemingly direct, Fishman’s work is daringly open. It poetically kindles the most pressing issues of our time: how humanity sees itself and allows itself to be seen; the extent to which technology alters our perception of ourselves; the choices we face whether to alter our reality or to alter our experience of it. Equally important to its meaning are its formal aspects: its juxtaposition of colors and patterns; its evocative art historical references; its oscillation between abstraction and representation. Of constant primacy is the work’s undeniable exactitude of craft, which elevates its physical presence to heights equal to its enigmatic conceptual depth.

Fishman has relentlessly sought out new materials and processes in order to realize her evolving vision. That search has occasionally yielded opportunities to pioneer new production techniques, always in service to the concepts she is exploring. Her materials list has included traditional supports such as wood, paper, blown glass and aluminum, as well as more unconventional elements like cast resin, mirrored Plexiglass, powder-coated metal and phosphorescent pigments. She also frequently uses mediums like chrome and urethane automotive paint that speak in conversation with the legacy of the Detroit area, where she has lived and worked as the Artist-in-Residence and Head of the Painting Department of the Cranbrook Academy of Art since 1992.

Since earning her MFA from Yale in 1980, Fishman has received multiple prestigious awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, and an NEA Fellowship Grant. Her work has been written about extensively in the press, including in Artforum, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Art21 Magazine, Art in America, Art Critical and ARTnews. Her recent solo exhibitions include DOSE, curated by Nick Cave, at the CUE Art Foundation, New York, NY, Pill Spill, at the Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, MI, and Pharmako, at Galerie Richard, Paris, France.

Work by Fishman is included in multiple private and institutional collections, including that of The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the MacArthur Foundation, Alfred Taubman, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Columbus Museum of Art, The Chrysler Museum of Art, and the Istanbul Art Centre.

About Alison:

Alison Gass is Dana Feitler Director of the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago. Gass leads the University’s fine arts museum and its thought-provoking exhibitions, distinctive public and arts education programs, varied collaborations with students and faculty, and exquisite collection of more than 15,500 objects.
Prior to joining the Smart Museum in May 2017, Gass was chief curator and associate director for exhibitions and collections at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. Before that, she was a member of the leadership team that opened the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, including serving as the museum’s acting director. Gass began her curatorial career at the Jewish Museum in New York City, then became an assistant curator at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Gass has curated major exhibitions at the Cantor Arts Center, Broad Art Museum, and SFMOMA. She was featured in a 2010 New York Times article highlighting “the new guard of curators.” Gass is a 2017 fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership and has taught at institutions including the California College of the Arts and the City College of New York.

Gass earned her bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and holds a graduate degree in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.

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