Janet Fish
February 2 - March 5, 2005
Reception for the Artist: Saturday, February 5 from 3:00 to 5:00 pm

Janet Fish’s new paintings invigorate the still life form through a celebration of the beauty of everyday objects such as flowers and plants, fruits and vegetables, glass vases and ceramic bowls, and rugs and textiles. Precisely arranged and executed in energetic strokes of intensely colored paint, Fish’s work delights the eye and challenges the mind. Catalogue available with interview by Robert Berlind and essay by Stephen Bennett Phillips.

Fish begins work by setting up a still life arrangement. Rather than selecting things for their symbolic meanings, Fish works intuitively, gathering objects that “seem right together,” allowing a theme to emerge from the assemblage itself. Because her canvases can take up to a month or more to complete, each is carefully planned to allow for a fluid situation that is open and rich in possibilities. The paintings grow and change in time and become a record of responses to what has been seen and experienced in the process of painting.

Many of Fish’s paintings function as a visual diary. Gifts from friends, or their admired and borrowed belongings, are featured in paintings such as Nan’s Kitchen, Celia Beaux’s Fruit, and Meredith’s Flowers. Since the 1980s Fish has spent an increasing amount of time each year in rural Vermont and the landscape of the state figures prominently in paintings such as Roses Nectarines Snow. Flowers grown in Fish’s garden enliven most of the paintings, in either primary or supporting roles. Some of Fish’s smaller paintings almost seem to serve as “portraits” of the individual object or small groups of objects depicted. Fish’s recent experimentation with simpler white backgrounds has resulted in a number of paintings that share some similarities with her early work.

Janet Fish’s artistic explorations began in the late 1960s and early 1970s 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. Fish says of this period, “I worked in a reductive way, eliminating everything that I was not interested in, and constructing paintings out of what interested me.” From the beginning, Fish adapted commonplace objects to her painterly concerns, insisting that the subject matter was relatively unimportant, and that meaning came from tone, gesture, color, light, scale and composition.

Since 1978, Fish has spent half the year in New York and half in the Green Mountains of Vermont. The shift to Vermont coincided with the incorporation of still life, human figures and landscape into increasingly complex scenes in which color, light, and shadow are masterfully handled. 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.

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DC Moore Gallery specializes in twentieth century and contemporary art. The gallery is located on the eighth floor of 724 Fifth Avenue between 56th and 57th Streets and is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 to 5:30. Press viewings can be arranged prior to the exhibition. For more information, for photographs, or to arrange a viewing, please call Sandra Paci at 212-247-2111.