Drawing from sources across the natural world, and driven by relentless curiosity, Richard Fishman’s sculpture practice spans more than fifty years.
Fishman’s creations are both engaging and beautiful. They draw you in with their allusions to the familiar in nature and beguile using opposing tensions within each piece. The complexity of the surface - and its counterpoint opacity and transparency - all allow him to uncover mysteries and then recover them with mysteries of his own.
Fishman has an enduring interest in combining a considered artistic approach with the operation of random incidents to generate new forms. As a result his finished work seems to be in a constant state of flux. The new works, mostly colored are built on a core of bronze or styrene and explore new avenues attempting to give shape to color, embedding the color in the sculpture rather than using it simply as a surface coating. The use of color in this way pushes the mutability of the form so that it appears to be in constant motion, almost filmic, flowing.
This way of engaging with color as sculpture carries forward several art historical strands that have skirted this issue but not resolved it. The leap that Fishman is taking is based on his observations of the natural world- lava flows, meteorites, coral growth- where color is intrinsic to and inseparable from the observed form.
Fishman continues to embrace his life long exploration of the complexities of nature. To realize the consequences of this new branch of his thinking he is creating objects that are a new way of looking at his source material: nature through a new prism.
Richard Fishman is a sculptor whose work is represented in numerous private and public collections including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design, The Jewish Museum NYC, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The DeCordova Museum, and the David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University.
Fishman has had 29 one-person exhibitions, more than 50 group exhibitions and is a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
Please send inquiries to: richard_fishman@brown.edu