Ethel Fisher, Double Portrait, Yellow Space (Ethel & Seymour), 1969, Oil on linen, 51 x 46 in. Courtesy/LewAllen Galleries

ART News:

SANTA FE — LewAllen Galleries announces its exclusive representation of the work of Ethel Fisher (1923-2017) and its first major exhibition of the artist’s work focusing on her figurative paintings, entitled Ethel Fisher: Portraits of the Sublime.

This exhibition will be accompanied by both a printed and a digital catalog and will open Friday, April 26, 2024 and remain on view through May 25, 2024.

Fisher is a highly distinguished American artist who lived and worked in New York, Miami and Los Angeles during a career that spanned seven decades. She is lauded especially for her distinctive large-scale figurative paintings featuring alluring portraiture of psychological depth and tension set against backgrounds of fields of color.

An artist of protean styles and enormous talent, Fisher has also been recognized for her abstract paintings which she exhibited successfully in Miami and Havana galleries and museums in the 1950s, as well as grid-like architectural paintings of ornate facades of iconic buildings in major cities, as well as lush landscapes, still lifes and interiors. LewAllen Galleries plans additional exhibitions to feature these striking works.

Born in Galveston, Texas, in 1923, Fisher moved to New York in the mid-1940s to study at the Art Students League. There, Fisher studied with the legendary Will Barnet, as well as noted teacher Morris Kantor during the early years of the Abstract Expressionist movement.

Fisher moved to Miami in 1947 where she became recognized for what she referred to as her “Abstract Impressionist” work. Soon, she was invited to exhibit her works at museums and galleries throughout the United States.

In 1961, Fisher left Miami to travel in Europe for a year, visiting major museums and becoming enamored of the human figure. Returning to New York in 1963 with her second husband, Seymour Kott, Fisher shifted her attention to figurative painting. At the end of the ‘60s, the couple moved to California where, in subsequent decades, Fisher produced a large body of work that included her important portraits which form the subject of this first LewAllen Galleries exhibition, as we well as the other works for which she would become well regarded.

Speaking about Fisher’s work in 1953, Fisher’s teacher and mentor, the renowned American painter Will Barnet, whose styles were equally protean to those of Fisher’s, remarked about her:

“Ethel Fisher’s paintings are full of light and love for rich surfaces. Dynamic movements vitalized her forms and make her paintings flow from area to area until the surface is brimming with life. But beneath this dynamic flow is a basic structure and contains the movement and gives meaning to her form. Her paintings are filled with joy for living.”

While the choice of subject matter in many examples of Fisher’s portrait works were personal and intimate, her approach to painting was always acclaimed to be unique and captivating. In her figurative paintings, many of which are included in this LewAllen exhibition, she painted portraits of prominent artists who were part of her social circle.

Prominent persons including Barnet, the AbEx artist Alice Baber, modernist painter Henry Pearson, photographer Martha Alf, and collagist Ilse Getz, among many others. Fisher also painted portraits of her daughters Margaret and Sandra, as well as her extended family, which included her son-in-law, the contemporary artist R.B. Kitaj and his sons, Lemm Dobbs and Max.

Ethel Fisher’s works are highly respected and held in the permanent collections of many important museums, including, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Kalamazoo Institute of Art, the Jewish Museum in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla, California, and the Fairfield University Art Museum in Connecticut, among others. Notably, Fisher was recognized by the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award for Painting in 1965.

Ethel Fisher, Alice Baber and Paul Jenkins, 1967, Oil on canvas, 51 x 40 in. Courtesy/LewAllen Galleries

Ethel Fisher, Portrait of Will Barnet, 1967, Oil on linen, 66 x 42.50 in. Courtesy/LewAllen Galleries

Ethel Fisher, Self Portrait Standing in Front of Sea and Mountains, 1986, Oil on canvas, 31 x 28 in. Courtesy/LewAllen Galleries

Ethel Fisher, Model in Red Robe, 1979, Oil on canvas, 68 x 54 in. Courtesy/LewAllen Galleries