JANET FISH

Janet Fish's new paintings are explosions of color and light. Precisely arranged and executed in energetic strokes of intensely colored paint they invigorate the still life form through her celebration of everyday objects. "Composition is about grabbing the viewer's eye and keeping it there in the painting," Fish explains. "And trying to keep that eye moving around...and not let it escape, so that whoever is looking...will start to see what's actually in the painting. That seemed to be the whole purpose of composition. To attract the eye and keep it there."

Janet Fish's artistic explorations began in the late 60s and early 70s with studies of groups of glass objects, transparent containers filled with liquids and fruits covered in supermarket cellophane. The imagery tapped into Pop Art concepts while the vigorous brushstrokes displayed a debt to Abstract Expressionism. Over the past two and a half decades, Fish has gradually opened up the backgrounds of her paintings and introduced more color, detail and complexity, While light and color remain the most obvious driving forces behind her work, volume and surface, scale, gesture and the movement of paint across canvas are of almost equal significance.

In the fall of 2002, Abrams will publish a monograph on the work of Janet Fish written by poet and critic Vincent Katz. The book will contain 100 color plates.