PRINT May 1994

LOUISE FISHMAN: VALLES MARINERIS, 1992

Bertha Harris

This week, associate editor Chloe Wyma introduces Bertha Harris’s meditation on painter Louise Fishman’s Valles Marineris, 1992, which was published in May 1994. Fishman is remembered by fellow painter Amy Sillman in “Unstraight Lines,” which appears in Artforum’s November issue, out now.

“It’s neither Venus nor oceans making their appearance through the surface calm of Valles Marineris, it’s her hair shirt,” writes Bertha Harris in her essay devoted to the 1992 canvas by Louise Fishman. Indeed, Valles Marineris, its charcoal field sectioned into a grid of sixteen uranium-green rectangular