Steven Alexander visits the exhibition Louise Fishman at Cheim & Read, New York, on view through October 27, 2012.

Alexander writes that Fishman's "new work, which grew in part out of a recent residency in Venice, presents a focused palette of blues and greens and pinks, ostensibly inspired by her strolls around the waterways taking photographs and soaking up the history. But there is nothing soft and nostalgic in these paintings. Each work presents the evidence of a direct physical encounter between the artist and her medium, with Fishman's trademark rawness ever present."