Justine Fisher: Anthem — Justine Fisher

Harper’s is pleased to announce Anthem, South African-born and New York-based artist Justine Fisher’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Featuring an entirely new body of paintings, the exhibition opens at Harper’s Chelsea 512 on Thursday, October 29, 6–8pm, with a reception attended by the artist.

Anthem marks the culmination of a two-year project during which Fisher slowly and deliberately reworked each painting countless times. Working on canvas stretched over panel supports, the artist abrades layers of pigment with an electric sander, allowing construction and erasure to unfold as interdependent stages of the same process. This additive and subtractive methodology turns trial and error into a mode of discovery, with each composition emerging through sustained engagement with its earlier states. “I think of these works as a deep excavation,” Fisher explains. “Emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually, I’m excavating each painting to find the picture within its material history.”

Across the new paintings, Fisher pushes her earlier Surrealist language toward a more primordial register, exploring how the untamed landscapes of the South African veld shape interior life rather than merely reflect it. Elephants and children gather beside blazing fires, peacocks idle within phosphorescent woods, and a figure grasping a tree trunk appears to be pulled through the air toward the mouth of a dense forest, as if drawn in by a supernatural force. Within these imagined prelapsarian worlds, bodies dissolve into their surroundings as the distinction between figure and landscape gives way to a unified, animate ecology. Here, Fisher’s scenes recall Symbolism’s use of nature as a vehicle for psychic allegory, suggesting that subjectivity—individual and collective alike—is not self-contained but continually formed through immersion in an organic world that exceeds rational comprehension.

Portraying such an intimate connection between self and environment stems from Fisher’s twenty-two-year practice of Iyengar yoga. The discipline’s sustained attention to breath and bodily alignment finds a parallel in compositions pushed toward disequilibrium, where a minute shift in tone or contour can stabilize an image or send it into disorder. Her technical command lies in negotiating the edge between these two states. Although the paintings are loose and turbulent, their instability is carefully calibrated: interlocking branches and raking fields of light sweep across the surfaces in a hallucinatory flux, held together by an underlying pictorial logic. Throughout Anthem, Fisher treats painting as a practice of continual recalibration, repeatedly burying and recovering the image until its surface can hold conflicting states in precarious balance.

As the exhibition title suggests, music provides a guiding structure for the series, with each painting taking its name from a song. Referencing Leonard Cohen’s 1992 track "Anthem" and its image of light entering through a crack, the title frames brokenness as a condition from which hope might emerge. “I felt a need for the works in this exhibition to reflect the contradictions of this concept, which encouraged me to reconsider my practice,” Fisher said in a statement. “The real turn came when I began listening to music as I worked and exploring how painting might share certain affinities with a time-based medium.” Light enters these pictures as a metaphor for possibility within seemingly insurmountable conditions. In this way, painting becomes an act of excavation, with Fisher sifting through the accumulated layers of her studio practice to uncover new aesthetic openings.

Justine Fisher (b. 1984, Cape Town, South Africa) lives and works in New York. She studied art history at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and received an MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2013. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions organized by Harper’s; Alexander Gray Associates, New York; Weosky Gallery, Berlin; the New York Academy of Art; Sotheby’s; and Phillips de Pury.