Louise Fishman at ICA: The power of tiny art

Leftovers!

That was my first, petulant response to "Paper Louise Tiny Fishman Rock," on display through Aug. 14 at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

The show's title creates the expectation of a hodgepodge, and it raises the question of what happened to the scissors. On first glance, this single-gallery exhibition of the artist Louise Fishman, who was born in Philadelphia in 1939, looks like too many little things.

Moreover, it is happening at the same time as a major career retrospective, at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, N.Y., so there is a bit of a hint that it consists of stuff that has been left behind, much of it in the artist's own studio.

Ingrid Schaffner, former chief curator of the ICA and also curator of this show, invites us to see the show as a kind of studio visit, one that focuses on Fishman's Philadelphia roots and her identity as a Jew, a feminist, and a lesbian. It shows some bodies of work - sculptures, painted books, paintings on carpet samples - for which the well-known abstract painter is not so well known.

Because there has been no shortage of exhibitions about Fishman in Philadelphia, most recently in 2013 at Woodmere, it makes sense to try to find other ways to see her work. Still, when I walked into the exhibition after a week's painful attempt to get control of some of my own clutter, I couldn't help feeling I was being subjected to somebody else's mess. There is even a vitrine in which are scattered, apparently at random, 119 monoprint plates. They are interesting - at least, what you can see of them - but their installation suggests that although they are too good to discard, neither artist nor curator wanted to think too much about them.

It didn't take long, though, for my impatience with this show to disappear. All I needed to do was rescale my expectations. This is a show that consists of a few large works and a great many small ones that are no less ambitious and deeply absorbing.

The key works are, as the label puts it, "50 tiny paintings, all Untitled, 2010 and 2014." Most of these are about three inches square in size, executed with a mixture of materials, including acrylic paint, wood collage, and sand. Some are on boards, but most are on stretched canvases, just like the larger works. They are not, as you might expect, quick little sketches or studies for larger works. Rather, each appears to be a well-considered and fully finished abstract painting.

Within each diminutive work, the artist's vision is bold, sometimes dramatically gestural; at other times, an evocation of light or atmosphere. She can achieve effects at this scale with a directness and simplicity that would be harder to achieve on a larger canvas. Small bits of wood and pigment can make a dramatic impact on these little pictures.

They are seductive in part because Fishman's work grows out of abstract expressionism, which was most often an art of big gestures on large canvases. Fishman's tiny works are, in their way, bold statements. She shows us she doesn't need to take up a whole wall to make her mark.

It is easy to see in these dollhouse-scale paintings a bit of gender jujitsu. She takes what the big boys of post-World War II American art did and renders it small. The dollhouse is a familiar symbol of the trapped woman, yet these museum collection Barbie-size paintings are more potent than they would be if they were big.

One of the larger paintings in the show is a 1983 self-portrait as a man. In an interview distributed at the show, Fishman recalls that feminist consciousness-raising made her realize that "everything I was doing as a painter - in terms of scale, gesture, and even using a stretched canvas and a paintbrush - was male, and this was problematic."

Her immediate response was to cut up some of her paintings and stitch them back together as a grid. There are a couple of these in the show, but they don't represent the artist at her best. Her long-term response was to do pursue her "masculine" art, but to experiment with different, perhaps less-aggressive forms.

In the same interview, she says she began doing the tiny paintings simply because she found a supply of small prestretched canvases in Germany. Before that, though, she began acquiring unconventional things on which to paint, including small samples of wall-to-wall carpeting. These roughly six-inch-square works come provocatively close to the notoriously bad-taste practice of painting on velvet, though in at least one case, it is difficult to tell whether you are seeing a piece of abstract art or a really pesky stain.

Beginning in the 1990s, she also began making painted, accordion-bound books, in which, as in all books, each page leads somehow to the next, whether through form, color, or a desire to contrast. Some individual images are bold, but what we see here is an artistic mind at work.

Also in the show are 34 very small sculptures in a wide variety of media, many of them pebble-size and a few pebblelike. They are painted, folded, molded, cast, stapled, and glued together. These look much better in photographs than they do in the exhibition, except for a few that can be viewed in isolation through peepholes in the wall. Sculpture needs to command its space; works this small probably have to be held to be understood.

Fishman's work comes out of a tradition that denies the windowlike quality of paintings, so although there are some implicit landscapes and elusive figures in her works, there is relatively little straightforward representation. Nevertheless, they are windows into ways of seeing.

And at a time when people are watching Star Wars on their cellphones, it should be easier to appreciate the tiny paintings. We know from looking at our screens it is not size that counts, but intensity.

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"Paper Louise Tiny Fishman Rock"

Through Aug. 14 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, 118 S. 36th St.

Hours: 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesdays; 11 to 6 Thursdays and Fridays; 11 to 5 Saturdays and Sundays.

Admission: Free.

Information: 215-898-7108 or www.icaphila.org.

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