Green's Apogee, 2005
Oil on linen, 88 × 70"
Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York

October 7 - 11, 2009

Louise Fishman: Among the Old Masters

As part of the Ringling International Arts Festival's aim to engage all of the Ringling's varied venues, for the duration of the festival paintings by contemporary artist Louise Fishman will be interspersed throughout the permanent collection galleries of the Museum of Art, which contain Western art made ca. 1300-1900. Fishman (b. 1939), who lives and works in New York City, paints in the abstract expressionist style. This post-World War II movement in American art emphasizes above all the artist's gesture on the canvas and counts among its best-known practitioners Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Fishman is herself renowned for her lean abstract paintings with muscular blocks of color in which paint is applied in many layers, often with a palette knife, until color stirs and glows. "Up close, her works seem the occasion of a meditation on life from which no impulse is excluded – there's the fervid muck and mess of paint, the vibrantly mottled smears of underpainting revealed by scraping, the slurry and scumble… From a distance, the large paintings in particular seem inhabited by apparitions as mysterious as they are commanding."

Six of Fishman's paintings will be installed in the Ringling's permanent collection galleries. These works will moreover be paired and thus placed in conversation with selected Old Master paintings. Monumental scale, intensely saturated color, boldly gestural application of paint, and fervent emotion characterize both Fishman's paintings and many of those in the Ringling collection; such shared qualities have inspired these pairings. Altogether, these striking interjections aim to enliven the Art Museum galleries visually and to invigorate the dialogue that takes place within them, inviting festival-goers to challenge their ideas concerning traditional museum installations, compare art across time, discover the continuities that link artistic traditions, and dissolve and cross boundaries between past and present, both real and imagined.