Vernon Fisher
K-Mart Conceptualism

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Texas
September 25, 2010 – January 2, 2011

“Born in 1943 at Fort Worth’s Harris Hospital, Vernon Fisher is one of Texas’s most internationally recognized artists. He has lived and worked in Fort Worth since 1977. Fisher received a BA in English literature from Hardin-Simmons University in 1967 and an MFA from the University of Illinois in 1969. Influenced by artists such as Edward Ruscha and John Baldessari, Fisher constructs visual narratives, combining images and language in a wide range of media.

‘The show,’ curator Michael Auping comments, ‘is a revealing look at a body of work that sprang from an especially interesting moment in contemporary art history in the late 1970s and early 1980s—a time when the legacies of Pop art and Conceptual art created a unique hybrid between painting and installation, inspiring narratives derived from juxtapositions of language and vernacular imagery. The subtitle of the exhibition refers to Fisher’s interest in philosophical enigmas coming out of working-class backdrops and situations.’ Fisher explains, ‘I have an attraction to that kind of subject matter, and have written my share of pieces featuring Dairy Queens, grocery stores, Laundromats, third-rate hotels, etc.’

The exhibition showcases the early collages that combine abstract painting, text, and image, as well as a selection of many of his best-known blackboard paintings, in which a faux blackboard surface is used as the ground for realistic, painted vignettes adjacent to fragments of different stories that suggest variously ambiguous meanings. A number of large–scale installations will also be included.”

– from the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.