With her high-gloss “pill reliefs,” the renowned US artist gives the pharmaceutical industry an entirely new visual language, creating seemingly abstract compositions in vibrant colors from iconic pill shapes. Her three-dimensional, geometric wall reliefs are not immediately associated with pills; rather, they represent a product aesthetic that offers a contemporary interpretation of hard-edge painting.

Beverly Fishman (born 1955 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) draws on the influence of advertising and the power of the pharmaceutical industry in her visual language. She aims to show how science, technology, and medicine affect our bodies and minds and how our culture defines us as either sick or healthy. She explores how our desires are fueled by mass media and how the products we consume shape our identity. In her powerful, visually electrifying works, she addresses the visual impact and allure of pharmaceuticals… their forms, colors, and materials.

The forms of her wall reliefs made from urethane paint are actually modeled after real pills, all of which she researched online. The notches on the surfaces symbolize the break lines that allow the tablets to be divided into smaller doses. Fishman’s reliefs typically combine two to five medications. The artist deliberately selects her meticulously crafted forms based on their medical applications. The titles of her works bear the names of the respective medical conditions.

For Beverly Fishman, color is an extremely material substance. Colors change depending on their composition, saturation, quantity, and use with other colors when placed in relation to one another. To understand the effect of colors, she first develops color studies in the form of collages. These collages are based on pill shapes, chosen to recall the tradition of high modernism, from hard-edge painting to minimalism.

To explore her color combinations, she uses color sample cards from hardware stores or fragments of vinyl signs to create mixtures of various natural and synthetic color systems. Once Fishman has decided on a color palette, she has the pill shapes made of wood and coated with an automotive paint, directly linked to the Detroit region. Since scale influences color relationships, she alters everything until it makes sense to her.

Fishman’s works are in the permanent collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts (Michigan), the Miami Art Museum (Florida), and the Istanbul Art Centre (Turkey). Her recent significant exhibitions include “Something For The Pain” at the Miles McEnery Gallery, New York (2023), and “CURE” at The Contemporary Dayton, Ohio (2022).