Vernon Fisher

Mark Moore Gallery proudly presents "The Long Road to Nowhere," a solo exhibition of blackboard paintings by Vernon Fisher. Marking the tenth solo presentation of Fisher's work with Mark Moore, this new body of work showcases some of the artist's most iconic techniques from his nearly forty five-year career. Reckoning with disjointed streams of consciousness and the non-sequiturs of modern psychology, Fisher investigates the fluidity of the mind at work with endless fascination and a comic’s sensibility.

Fisher's preoccupation with archive, information transmission, memory, and taxonomy stems from an early interest in how people make sense of the world. His hallmark blackboard paintings recall pedagogical lessons or speculative renderings, oftentimes replacing sequential logic with "disordered notations" analogous to excerpts from an unrepressed mindscape. Often weaving literary references, pop cultural imagery, and cartography with his own symbolic lexicon, Fisher renounces the convention of a singular, autonomous narrative in favor of a seemingly endless metonymic chain. Often contextualized within a postmodern lineage, Fisher's work shares affinities with Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg, as expounded in Frances Colpitt's monograph essay for Vernon Fisher (University of Texas Press, 2010) – which was produced in tandem with Vernon Fisher: K-Mart Conceptualism, his career retrospective at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

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), San Diego Museum of Art (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.