Janet Fish:
Recent Paintings
February 9 – March 17, 2012
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 9, 6:00 – 8:00 PM
DC Moore Gallery is pleased to present Janet Fish’s most recent work. Drawing
from the tradition of still life painting, Fish defies its connotations by engaging
primarily with the movement of paint. Her paintings radiate with bold color and
light, and her gestural brushstrokes guide the eye through transparent surfaces
and across intricate patterns in paint. A catalogue with an essay by Lilly Wei will
be available.
Fish sometimes spends days meticulously arranging her compositions with
objects that often connote particular seasons or activities. The specific objects
chosen, however, do not create the content of the work. Fish utilizes colored
glassware, crystal tchotchkes, patterned textiles, and vibrant floral bouquets
merely as a surface for her energetic exploration of the properties of paint. “The
real structure of a painting comes from the movement of color over the surface,”
Fish has said. Indeed, the wild and mesmerizing motion of her colored lines
combined with commonplace decorative items produces what artist and critic
Robert Berlind has called a “hallucinatory experience of the everyday.”
Fish attributes her fascination with
light and color to her childhood spent
in Bermuda. Her grandfather was the
American Impressionist painter Clark
Voorhees, and her mother was a
sculptor. Fish attended Smith
College and earned her Master’s
Degree in Fine Art from Yale
University in 1963, when art school
faculties taught Abstract
Expressionism. Fish notes that she
absorbed those artists’ interest in
gesture and matters of form, but
she independently gravitated toward figuration. Fish lives in New York City and
Vermont.
Works by Janet Fish are included in the permanent collections of The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New
York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; Dallas
Museum of Fine Arts, TX; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; and
American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, New York, among others.
Harry N. Abrams published a monograph of Fish’s work by poet and critic
Vincent Katz in 2002. DC Moore Gallery is the exclusive representative of Janet
Fish. On view concurrently in the West Gallery: Charles Burchfield: Landscapes
1916-1962
Upcoming Exhibitions:
Robert De Niro, Sr. March 22 – April 28
Mark Innerst May 3 – June 8
***
Charles Burchfield:
Landscapes 1916-1962
February 9 – March 17, 2012
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 9, 6:00 – 8:00 PM
One of the most original artists of the twentieth century, Charles Burchfield (1893-1967)
created highly personal works that project an atmospheric intensity and a strong sense
of mood. Throughout his life, he found evidence of the divine in the natural world and
frequently imbued his paintings with a sense of otherworldly presence. This focused
exhibition in our West Gallery presents a prime selection of watercolors that spans his
fifty-year career.
Among his earliest paintings are modernist views of his hometown of Salem, Ohio and
the surrounding countryside. While a student at the Cleveland School of Art from 1912-
16, Burchfield was introduced to major trends in European and American modernism,
Chinese and Japanese art, and contemporary design theory. His work at the time often
evidenced an interest in imaginative, expressionist landscapes and a personal visual
language of fantasy. In Sunlight in Park (1917), he approached abstraction through the
bold optical effects of a burst of sunlight that creates dense, colorful patterning on a
screen of trees while also illuminating the ground below.
After moving to Buffalo, New York, in 1921, Burchfield engaged a deeper concern with
realism and became a founder of the American Scene painting movement. Much of his
work addressed the harsh realities
of twentieth-century industrialization
and life in small towns and urban
areas. At the same time, he strived
for compositions that were almost
classical in form and often poetic in
feeling. He once wrote that he
preferred to be known as a
“romantic-realist,” adding, “It is the
romantic side of the real world that I
portray. My things are poems—(I
hope).”
In the early 1940s, Burchfield
returned to a more active expressionism. Swirling skies, anthropomorphic forms, visual
notations of insect sounds, and heavily outlined trees radiating a visible energy are some
of the elements that characterize his watercolors from the decades that followed. He
also focused on what he knew best—the landscape around his home in upstate New
York. In Brown Land (c. 1962-63), he turned his attention to one of his favorite subjects,
an intimate view of a field, a close up of a cluster of plants set against a backdrop of
schematic trees at a time of seasonal transition.
In both his life and art, Burchfield saw the universal in the particular, and nothing was too
small or insignificant to capture his attention. He felt strongly that his identity as an artist
was bound up with his relation to nature. “I feel impelled to embrace the earth,” he wrote
in his journals. On another day spent in the fields and woods, he found that his “spirit
was in complete harmony with the world of nature and absorbed every sight and sound
with a completeness that has not been my lot for many a month.”
DC Moore Gallery is the exclusive representative of The Charles E. Burchfield
Foundation.
On view concurrently: Janet Fish: Recent Paintings
***
DC Moore Gallery specializes in contemporary and twentieth-century art. The gallery is located at 535 West
22nd Street, 2nd Floor and is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 to 6. Press previews can be arranged
prior to the exhibition. For more information, for photographs, or to arrange a viewing, please contact Kate
Weinstein at 212-247-2111 or kweinstein@dcmooregallery.com.
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