Beverly Fishman

The Chrysler Museum of Art explores our relationship to medicine, branding, and identity with the exhibition Beverly Fishman: In Sickness and In Health.

“Critics have compared my work to both post-Pop art and Minimalist styles,” Fishman wrote in her artist’s statement. “I do engage directly with the legacies of these movements, but I pursue an aesthetic that combines abstract form with social and political critique.”

In this case, the critique is aimed at the pharmaceutical industry, from its marketing clout to the limits of its usefulness. This exhibition grows from a series of earlier works she called Pill Spills.

“In each of these works…I treat the museum or gallery space as a living organism by releasing pharmaceuticals into the institution’s interior,” Fishman wrote. “The capsule serves both as an icon and as a vehicle for abstraction, through which changing color and pattern combinations unfold. The glass pills, which cannot dissolve, present multiple paradoxes. How are we to ingest their substances? Are they cure or poison? Can art treat social ills, or is it just a placebo?”

Beverly Fishman: In Sickness and In Health will be on view through Jan. 3, 2016, and admission is free. Click here to read a review of this exhibition in ArteFuse.