Beverly Fishman 2025 by Miles McEnery Gallery

THIS COULD BE THE CURE

Meredith Mendelsohn

A little pill carries so much promise—wellness, relief, calm, focus, vitality, pleasure. But also, so much menace. Beverly Fishman channels all of that, and more, in her sculptural abstract paintings inspired by the highly calculated designs of prescription pills.

Fishman has spent the better part of her career pondering the dual nature of drugs and the health-care machine. She has closely observed the normalization of pill-popping and the evolving medicalization of life. And she has watched modern medicine shape the lives of her loved ones, for good and for bad.

The works she creates in response are just what the doctor ordered—or maybe even better. In “Geometries of Hope (and Fear),” she introduces sixteen new works that continue to spotlight the fraught world of pharmaceuticals through her own brand of dynamic geometric abstraction. Her vividly colored, immaculately produced paintings on wood supports are shaped to resemble enlarged pills, which she then subtly links together to create unique prescription cocktails. Each arrangement is a discrete work of art, an alluring visual placebo coaxing different psychic effects based on Fishman’s juxtapositions of color, shape, and volume.

Always in the back of Fishman’s mind are the industry’s marketing machinations. “Nothing is by chance,” says the artist, who has spent decades researching the pharmaceutical industry. “They’d put electrodes on people’s heads and then show them pills of different sizes and colors, and they’d watch the reaction in the brain. And that’s how they decided that a big pill was better than a small pill for this particular illness, or that a blue one worked better for that specific disease. Or that two pills were better than one.”

Her art is just as intentional, conceived with the precision of a chemist and the sensitivity of a poet, and painstakingly executed through numerous steps. The perfection of her forms—circles, ovals, triangles, squares, and rectangular slivers—suggests the geometric rigor of a pharmaceutical pill extruder, but her artistic choices elevate them high above drugstore banality. She is a skilled colorist, concocting and contrasting unlikely hues to energize, dazzle, or subdue. Those colors are then transformed into opaque automotive paint, which covers the forms in perfectly uniform concentric bands. She frequently bevels the edges of her wood supports so they take on a jewel-like quality under their pristine surfaces. They are treasures, after all, she seems to be telling us with a wink.

An artist and a former educator, Fishman helmed the painting department at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, for 27 years. She is an astute observer of art history, and we can sense that in her singular style, which seamlessly blends artistic modes we rarely see come together. She soaked up the feminism of Ree Morton (a mentor) and the artists of the Pattern and Decoration movement. We can sense that, in particular, in the way that her forms almost feel stitched together. But this body of work, with its high-production value and pared-down geometries, clearly shares DNA with some rigorous postwar modernist modes, from Minimalism and Op Art, to hard-edge painting and Finish Fetish. She gives us a truly stimulating optical experience, but with the bonus of a political twist, her formal choices stealthily guiding us into the social fabric rather than removing us from it. Her pristine surfaces and streamlined shapes may show no obvious sign of her hand, for instance—a classic Minimalist strategy—and yet that erasure feels central to her institutional critique, posing an uncanny parallel to the anonymity and opacity of Big Pharma.

The lack of transparency in an industry with so much power over our well-being is one of her primary concerns. “Why is there a tag on your sweater telling you where it’s made, but not on your medicine?” she asks. She once tried to find out where the drugs used to anesthetize her for surgery were from. No one could tell her. “I’m not saying drugs are bad. I’m saying we should understand that drugs are being sold to us, the way everything in the world is being sold to us. Pharmaceutical companies compete with one another, and they are all trying to maximize their profits.”

A critique of consumer culture, a fascination with product design, an expansive palette of vivid high-contrast colors—the legacy of Pop art is also not far off. The tactics of advertising and marketing are especially inscribed in largescale works in which Fishman arranges her pill-shaped components horizontally. Strung together like words or glyphs in an illegible typeface, these communications—made to be felt, not intellectualized—beckon us like store signage or corporate logos. Some of her more vertical arrangements bring to mind molecular formulas in medication package inserts.

In “Geometries of Hope (and Fear),” Fishman introduces several new works from her ongoing series, which she calls Polypharmacy —a term that means taking multiple medications simultaneously. In their orderly alignment and institutional pastels and grays, they seem to telegraph safety and familiarity. But there are secrets. Something always feels a little off. It’s a palette from another reality, another era, summoning shades of makeup and pill packaging from the past, but also the future.

Color is crucial to her vision, and she experiments with it tirelessly, starting with small collages made from paint sample cards, color swatches, and other fragments. She intuitively seeks the right—or perfectly

wrong—combinations and strategically places the paint. Her surfaces might be concave or convex, impossibly glossy or seductively textured—shaping our perceptions of color at every turn. Some forms are left open, like empty frames or life-preserver rings, so she can paint their interior rims. There is something oddly intimate about this, like body parts we don’t usually see. These passages, often painted in neon shades, cast atmospheric hazes—a “chemical fluorescence,” as Fishman describes it—onto the vacant walls beneath. Their materiality seems to dissolve as we stand before them. Each work vibrates on a different frequency; each has its own microclimate.

With each new body of work, Fishman’s pill count grows. “Geometries of Hope (and Fear)” includes her most complex cocktails yet—eight, nine, ten different pill-like components in a single assemblage. “They started as one solid pill, and then I broke them in half,” the artist explains. “Then they became three pills, and then four, and then five, and then more. In your eighties you can be on up to fifteen pills a day. I’d like to get up to eighteen pills in a single piece.”

The challenge of positioning so many pill forms in a single work inspired Fishman to develop an important new compositional strategy. In six works that are introduced here, she abandons the x and y axis for a more expressive jumble. The idea came to her when she saw a photo of her friend’s daily pill intake in the palm of his hand. We can sense the anatomical contours in the vaguely triangular arrangements, and there’s a new whiff of movement and randomness, as though the pills have just been scooped off the bathroom counter or are succumbing to gravity as they slide down someone’s throat. We sense a stronger human presence. Fishman’s own hand is also more visible, glimpsed in the off-kilter positioning of some of the components. She calls these works Equilibrium .

Fishman listens closely to the verbiage of medical marketing. “The pharmaceutical industry promotes different medications to different groups of people and uses different language depending on whom they are addressing,” she says. She puts equal thought into the titles of her works, and they play a crucial role in our experience of her abstractions. She first began listing the conditions that each of her enlarged fantasy pills might be treating—epilepsy, pain, ADHD, and anxiety, for instance. In 2023, she began listing the desired effects of the drugs instead. “I realized that what I wanted for my own work was for it to convey the intensity of a transformational experience,” she says. “So, the titles started describing what you wanted from the medication.” She also added the term “Polypharmacy.” Polypharmacy: Comfort, Equanimity, Confidence, Choice, Serenity, Joy, Pleasure (2024), for instance, is an orderly horizontal arrangement that communicates control and harmony. Two open half-circles bookend the other forms like parentheses, firmly holding them all together.

For her more populated works, Fishman sought a shorter naming convention. She landed on Equilibrium (followed by a parenthetical notation just for her own use). “We are always trying to maintain homeostasis, balance, a complex interaction between multiple external and internal forces,” explains the artist.

The way those dueling forces shape our lives has long haunted Fishman. Her exploration of medical themes began early on with curiosity about congenital illnesses in her family and how microscopic differences impact identity—how our genetic makeup and biological realities are separate and yet inseparable from the way we are perceived. Her abstractions began with cells, and we can still sense that underlying structure in the way her constituent components come together to comprise a whole.

“I was interested in our materiality, our physical composition, and how one minute shift in our cellular chemistry could change our whole lives,” she says. “I was asking the question, ‘Who am I?’ But I wasn’t interested in how we looked. Or the figure. It was more cellular.” The AIDS crisis in the 1980s was also formative. “I understood how the virus was an organism that could radically transform your entire physical chemistry and how your whole life could be affected by it. It could become part of your identity, and it could determine how you were treated. Or even how men and women were treated differently, and how that radically affected your life.”

Fishman began exploring anatomy in medical books, and then the imagery of medical technology—MRIs and CT scans. Works on metal mimicking those technologies followed. “I was tracking developments in how we were imaged—or imagined—and how this imaging fractured us into pieces, and how these fragments told the story of our health,” she recalls. Her interest in biotechnology and the body was not popular. The subject was just too taboo.

Today, the subject of medicine feels increasingly relevant, with our massive aging population, a growing number of adolescents on mind-altering prescriptions, and radical changes to our health-care system looming on the horizon. “I just want my work to start a conversation that doesn’t have a didactic end, to provide an experience that makes you want to stay long enough to think,” she says. And that it does. Her growing body of geometric abstractions not only catapult a pressing cultural reality to the forefront of our consciousness, but they are incredibly rewarding to look at. The placebo effect is real.

Meredith Mendelsohn is a New York-based art writer and historian. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Architectural Digest, CNN Style, The Brooklyn Rail, ARTnews, and 1stDibs:Introspective, among other publications. She has contributed to several books about Andy Warhol published by Taschen.

Polypharmacy: Confidence, Energy, Joy, Liberation, 2024

Urethane paint on wood

44 x 40 1/2 inches

112 x 103 cm