Untitled, 2005
Acrylic on corrugated paper
Paper: 30.4 x 38 in. (77.2 x 96.5 cm)
Frame: 36.6 x 44.4 in. (93 x 112.8 cm)
Fish-1092-C
Courtesy the Louise Fishman Estate
ANGRY WOMEN, 1973
Comprised of 30 acrylic on paper works each measuring 26 x 40 inches
Install dimensions variable
Fish-1086-OS
Courtesy The Louise Fishmen Estate
ANGRY HILLARY, 2008
Acrylic on paper
Paper: 27.25 x 40.25 inches
Frame: 31.25 x 45.25 inches
Fish-1087-C
Courtesy The Louise Fishman Estate
"Angry Hillary emerges from Louise Fishman’s historically significant and influential Angry Women series, created in 1973, in which the artist paired the word “ANGRY” with women’s names and surrounded them with charged, gestural abstraction. Across the series, Fishman rejected compositional harmony in favor of urgency, fragmentation, and visible painterly force — a visual language shaped by feminist consciousness and her refusal of the inherited conventions of male-dominated abstraction.
Years after the series completion, Fishman returned to it in 2008 to create Angry Hillary, based on Hillary Clinton, a public figure whose career has been persistently shaped by the expectations and constraints imposed upon women in positions of power. Rather than functioning as a conventional portrait, Angry Hillary operates as a field of tension in which language, gesture, and paint collide. Its layered surface carries a sense of accumulation and disruption, as color and mark resist resolution and instead sustain conflict in suspension.
Like the earlier works in the Angry Women series, Angry Hillary refuses closure. Here, the word “ANGRY” functions not as a fixed label, but as an expansive political and emotional condition — one that speaks to histories of frustration, exclusion, resistance, and endurance experienced by women navigating systems historically structured to marginalize them.
Fishman’s practice transformed abstraction into a site of embodiment, rupture, and lived experience. In Angry Hillary, that legacy continues. Abstraction becomes a means of holding pressure rather than resolving it, allowing emotion, politics, and form to coexist without reconciliation."*
*Excerpted from the publication “Unfinished Republic: America at 250,” ISBN: 979-8-3507-6518-2, page 14.
Louise Fishman Afternoon in December, 2007 - 2008
Oil on linen
60 x 50 1/4 in. (152.4 x 127.6 cm)
Private Collection
Courtesy The Louise Fishman Estate
