Rago Auctions

Born in 1939 in Philadephia, Pennsylvania, Louise Fishman came from an artistic family. After attending the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and earning her Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1965, Fishman relocated to New York City, where she initially explored hard-edge abstraction. Throughout her career, Fishman mainly focused on painting, with a brief exploration into sculpture. As Fishman's involvement in feminist groups like Redstockings, WITCH, and the New York Feminist Art Institute grew, she became acutely aware of the male-dominated history of art. This realization prompted a shift in her work whereby she reflected on the relationship between her female, queer identity and artistic practice. To highlight this, curator Marcia Tucker placed a small painting of Fishman's next to a monumental work by Kenneth Noland for the Whitney Biennial in 1973.

During the 1980s, Fishman's art became more allusive, utilizing a wide range of colors and materials to reference an array of people, settings, and historical events. Her works from the late 1980s pay homage to her Jewish heritage and visits she made to the Auschwitz and Terezín concentration camps by incorporating rubble from both sites into her paintings. In 1990, her studio in upstate New York burned down, leading her to relocate to New Mexico, where she developed a close relationship with Agnes Martin, whose meticulous grid compositions influenced Fishman's work. After a 2011 visit to Venice with her partner Ingrid Nyeboe, Fishman's later paintings featured shades of blue increasingly. These works were jointly inspired by the ocean, certain Titian paintings, and Nyeboe's eyes.

Fishman passed away in New York City in 2021, but she left behind an enduring legacy in the art world, with her works represented in various prestigious collections, solo exhibitions, and retrospectives, including at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York, and Cheim & Read gallery in New York City. While not explicitly autobiographical, Fishman's art was deeply rooted in her cultural, political, and emotional experiences as a female, queer artist in an art world predisposed to male creators. Although she was not fully appreciated in her lifetime, critics and collectors alike have posthumously begun to gain a greater appreciation for Fishman's artistic contributions.