Vernon Fisher: A Retrospective - Curated by Hugh Davies (MCASD)

Mark Moore Gallery is pleased to present “Vernon Fisher: A Retrospective," curated by Hugh Davies – Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego (CA). For nearly forty-five years, Fisher has been creating innovative mixed media works that reckon with disjointed streams of consciousness and push the boundaries of post-modernism. Having exhibited widely since the late 1970s, this retrospective presents hallmark works from various stages in Fisher’s career, and highlights his preoccupation with archive, information transmission, memory, and taxonomy.

Drawing upon his early interest in how people make sense of the world, Fisher weaves together literary references, pop cultural imagery, and cartography with his own symbolic lexicon. Renouncing the convention of a singular or autonomous narrative, his works imply a seemingly endless metonymic chain. Hugh Davies first saw Fisher's work in the late seventies and was immediately impressed with the combination of conceptual rigor, and consummate craftsmanship. Davies, along with co-curator Madeleine Grynsztejn, organized a mid-career retrospective of Fisher’s work at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in 1989. In the accompanying catalogue essay, critic Dave Hickey stated that Fisher works in a kind of formula of “imperfectly analogous juxtapositions of three imperfectly distinct kinds of phenomena (the personal, the social, the natural), described by three imperfectly distinct information systems (the literary narrative, the iconographic image, and the cartographic grid).” In viewing various works made over time, these “imperfectly analogous juxtapositions” begin to form their own story, revealing Fisher’s expertise in creating a unique and elusive narrative with a comic’s sensibility.

Vernon Fisher (b. 1943, Texas) has been included in two Whitney Biennials (most recently in 2000). Museum installations include the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Hirshhorn Museum (D.C.), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (IL). Major public collections include: Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo, (NY), Art Institute of Chicago (IL), Baltimore Museum of Art (MD), Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Dallas Museum of Art (TX), Denver Art Museum (CO), Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis (MN), High Museum of Art, Atlanta (GA), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (TX), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (IL), Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (TX), Museum of Modern Art (NY), Orange County Museum of Art (CA), Phoenix Art Museum (AZ), San Antonio Museum of Art (TX), Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (CA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (NY), Tucson Museum of Art, (AZ), Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (MN). The artist lives and works in Fort Worth, TX

Hugh M. Davies, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego since 1983, is an internationally recognized scholar of contemporary and modern art. He has organized major exhibitions including: Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface (2011-2012), Robert Irwin: Primaries and Secondaries (2007), Francis Bacon: The Papal Portraits of 1953 (1999), and William Kentridge: Weighing…and Wanting (1998). Davies co-curated the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial (2000), and was U.S. Exhibition Director at the 37th Venice Biennale (1976). A Francis Bacon scholar, Davies has published extensively and serves on the Francis Bacon Authentication Committee. He holds his Ph.D. from Princeton University.