Julia Fish: bound by spectrum

This exhibition catalog, Julia Fish: bound by spectrum, presents a fully-illustrated survey of the last decade of Fish’s paintings and works on paper. It offers new scholarship around Fish’s ongoing project that brings together the disciplines of painting, drawing, and architecture. For three decades, Fish has used her house and its vernacular architecture—a Chicago storefront workspace designed by Theodore Steuben in 1922—as the basis for a system of mapping color, form, and light in paintings and works on paper. Working from close observation, she renders architectural details at actual size and creates a dialog between objective information and subjective response. These works are informed by effects of light in space, time of day, the seasons, cardinal direction, and the artist’s own physical vantage point. Accompanying the images of Fish’s works are essays by Julie Rodrigues Widholm, Kate Nesin, and Colm Tóibín, images and text by architect Dan Wheeler, and a selection of the artist’s studio notations.
 

Julie Rodrigues Widholm is the director of UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). Prior to BAMPFA, Rodrigues Widholm was director and chief curator at DePaul Art Museum and a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.