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PRESS RELEASE
Vernon Fisher
Zulu
April 15 through May 20, 2000
Dunn and Brown Contemporary is pleased to announce Vernon Fisher: Zulu, opening on Saturday, April 15, 2000. This exhibition will include works on paper, paintings, and installation specific works.
A native of Fort Worth, Vernon Fisher is undeniably one of Texas’ most acclaimed artists. In 1981, his work was shown in three major museum exhibitions of contemporary American art, held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. By 1989, Fisher was honored with a mid-career, traveling exhibition organized by the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. In 1990, he was the first Texas artist to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Fisher has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts in 1974, 1980, and 1981, and in 1984, he received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant. Fisher received the Distinguished Teaching of Art Award from the College Art Association in 1992, and in 1995, he received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Two recent paintings by Fisher are currently in the prestigious 2000 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Fisher creates visual stories by synthesizing a range of media: drawing, painting, photography, found objects, fabricated objects, and text. Throughout the Zulu exhibition, Fisher combines text with image and abstraction with realism. The works in this exhibition range from the large-scale Painting in the Pacific to more intimate text-based works on paper to an installation of fabricated piles of chalk on the gallery floor. In each work, Fisher layers different forms of visual information, creating a sense of tension within each work, as issues of resolution and closure are brought into question.
In Painting in the Pacific, a fabricated roll-up map of the South Pacific hangs in front of a fabricated blackboard. In the center of the black and white map is a small painting of the ocean with intense color. Fisher’s arrangement of this painting’s parts suggests a history lesson whose specifics are lost. While Fisher painted the sea painting on the surface of the map in Painting in the Pacific, he painted a grand landscape in miniature over an enormous target painting in Zulu. The almost hypnotic power of the "soft-target" dominates the slightly off-centered landscape, as the 19th Century notion of the landscape as the sublime is replaced by the sublime abstraction of the 20th Century. Similar issues are raised in Fisher’s "zombie" paintings in which Fisher creates two abstract horizontal fields of color in each work only to interrupt this pure abstraction with life-like flies, meticulously made of cast epoxy, resting on the surfaces of the paintings and the surrounding walls. In each work and throughout the installation of Zulu, notions of resolution and closure are brought into question, and a kind of cognitive tension is created.
Vernon Fisher will be present at the opening reception from 2:00 p.m. until 6:00 p.m. on Saturday, April 15. Dunn and Brown Contemporary is open to the public Tuesday through Saturday from 11:00 until 5:00 and by appointment. Images of works in the exhibition are available upon request.