Justine Fisher

Kindly donated by Justine Fisher

Justine Fisher (b. 1984, Cape Town, South Africa; lives and works in Watermill, NY) creates large-scale oil paintings that blend abstraction and figuration, landscapes and domestic interiors, and the real and the uncanny. Known for her early figurative work featuring tightly-cropped, close up views of nude women, Fisher has recently begun to more clearly visualize the spaces her subjects occupy. Each painting originates from a sketch or idea that is shaped by a collage the artist generates from personal and found photographs and magazine clippings. As it did for her modernist predecessors, this practice allows Fisher to simultaneously represent and disrupt the traditional portrayal of space. She is most interested in exploring the realm between the concrete and the abstract, the domestic and the external, and the idyllic and the uncomfortable. Working within these liminal spaces, Fisher builds numerous gestural layers of color, form, and texture to create works that draw from traditional genres, art history, her own personal experiences, and the natural world to investigate the complexity of human nature, intellect, and desire.

Each seemingly disparate element of Fisher’s multi-layered paintings offer the viewer a point of entry and contemplation, and her distinct combination of symbols, figures, architectural structures, and natural formations imply an abundance of interpretations. In her newest series, each painting depicts a dense landscape marked by a path, archway, doorway, or slide that leads to a mysterious place. The figures appear out of context, as though they were suddenly transported from a ballet, a beach, a shower, or a pool party into an ominous and somewhat otherworldly landscape. Featuring almost exclusively women and children, the only “man” that appears in this series is what Fisher refers to as the “bubbleman,” a figure whose body is composed entirely of brightly colored balls of the type commonly found in a children’s ball pit. In one work, Fisher’s bubbleman stands in the foreground at the entrance of a path that runs along a stream, while a young girl, dressed in a tutu and leotard stands nearby staring into the tranquil water. While the relationship between the figures is unclear, the bubbleman (though at first glance clownlike and playful) gives the work a melancholic and somewhat sinister tone.

While the incongruousness present in her compositions gives Fisher’s paintings a slightly jarring undertone, the ominous quality in her work is not meant to connote danger or violence but rather relates to transformation and the discomfort that comes with meaningful change. For Fisher, the colorful balls that make up the Bubbleman represent the breath―inhalation and exhalation―that connects us to our body and its surroundings. Her recent work is less focused on investigating the subject and instead aims to illuminate our relationship to place―physical, metaphorical, or fictional. Fisher explains, “if the figure consumes the space it’s all about the ‘I,’ the ego. If the space holds the figure or even if the figure is absent, there is a higher level of objectivity, so it becomes more about a greater consciousness and empathy.” Fisher's recent exploration of otherworldly space is ultimately a way to get at the heart of the true nature of humanity and the many dimensions of our intellect, emotions, and corporeality.

Fisher received her MFA in 2013 from the New York Academy of Art, her BFA in 2010 from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and her BA in Art History in 2007 from New York University Gallatin School of Individualized Study.