An Hour is a Sea
Between a few, and me—
With them would Harbor be—

by Emily Dickinson

As the world has come to a moment of forced quietness, Vielmetter Los Angeles presents to you a series of online exhibitions during this unprecedented and challenging time. Our first online exhibition —“An Hour is a Sea” by New York artist Louise Fishman — features a suite of exquisitely tiny paintings (each measuring approximately 2 to 4 inches), alongside a serenely calm and meditative Untitled work from 1971, and a lustrous painting from 2016, entitled Jasper.

We had initially planned to present these works in May at Frieze NY (which has now been canceled) — so it is with great pleasure that we can honor this beautiful body of work and present it to you here online.

Each of the twenty-seven mini-masterpieces conjures moments of intimacy, while collectively, the group performs a contemplative dance across the energetic surfaces linked by a cohesive sense of color, gesture, layer, and texture. Flanked by Untitled (1971) and Jasper (2016), the works on view offer a timeless and atmospheric perspective on Fishman’s unwavering exploration of scale, material, mark-making, and light within the field of abstraction.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a forthcoming limited-edition publication entitled MY TRANSPARENT SELVES, designed by Ink, Inc. (New York, NY) with an essay by the art historian and curator, Jan Avgikos.

The gallery extends our warmest wishes to you all. We are available to answer any questions you might have and look forward to hearing from you.

Louise Fishman was born in 1939 in Philadelphia. In 1956 she began studying art at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art, then at Stella Elkins Tyler School of Art, where she earned her BFA in Painting and Printmaking, and a B.S. in Art Education in 1963. She completed her MFA in Painting and Printmaking at the University of Illinois in Champaign/Urbana, and headed directly to New York in 1965, where she has lived and worked ever since. Her work is represented in many public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg, PA; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; the Jewish Museum, New York; the Kunstmuseum Lichtenstein, Vaduz, Lichtenstein, among others. Awards include three National Endowment for the Arts grants, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has also participated in several artists’ residencies, most recently at the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy. She was included in three Whitney Biennials, 1973, 1987, and 2014—the last biennial at the Breuer building. In 2016, the Neuberger Museum of Art organized the artist’s first career retrospective, curated by Helaine Posner; the retrospective traveled to the Weatherspoon Art Museum, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and was accompanied by a second exhibition at the ICA Philadelphia titled Paper Louise Tiny Fishman Rock, curated by Ingrid Schaffner. A retrospective of work on paper, A Question of Emphasis: Louise Fishman Drawing is forthcoming at the Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, IL in January 2021.