NYAB Event - Janet Fish “Glass & Plastic, The Early Years, 1968-1978”

Janet Fish “Glass & Plastic, The Early Years, 1968-1978”

DC Moore Gallery

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DC Moore Gallery present Janet Fish: Glass & Plastic, The Early Years, 1968-1978. Drawn primarily from private collections, this major exhibition of Fish’s early work underscores her foundational engagement with just two materials: glass and plastic. The catalogue accompanying the exhibition features excerpts from Fish’s 1988 oral history interview for the Archives of American Art. The previously unpublished text illuminates her aims and concerns as a young painter.

Janet Fish has revitalized the traditional genre of still life with an expansive body of work that revels in the formal and conceptual possibilities of surprising combinations of objects seen in changing lights. Her innovative career began in the 1960s and 1970s, when she set herself the challenge of capturing the interactions of light with glass and plastic. The resulting large-scale paintings explore color, composition, and mark making through the representation of surfaces at once reflective and transparent, material and immaterial, mundane and magical. Fish’s unique approach to still life, or nature morte, rethinks these very terms. She explains, “It’s really as much painting life as anything else …. because it’s not dead. Things aren’t dead. The light is through everything and energy through everything.”