Post-War & Contemporary Art

Provenance:

Robert Miller Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above in 1981

Lot Note:

Janet Fish’s Pink Ribbon and Yellow Ribbon (1981) is a vivid example of her approach to still life, a genre she revitalized through a strong focus on light, color, and perception. Born in Boston into a family of artists and art historians, Fish studied at Smith College and later received her MFA from Yale University, where she moved away from abstraction toward a more representational practice rooted in close observation. Her work is closely associated with a renewed interest in still life painting in late 20th-century American art, particularly for the way it transforms everyday domestic objects into complex studies of visual experience.

In Pink Ribbon and Yellow Ribbon, a tabletop is crowded with looping pink and yellow ribbons, a glossy purple teapot, glass vessels, stacked plates, and a bowl of brightly colored candy. Tulips cut across the background, their curved forms echoing the movement of the ribbons. Although the arrangement feels spontaneous, it is carefully constructed to explore how light behaves across different surfaces. Glass, glaze, and polished materials shift between opacity and reflection, producing a sense of constant visual movement. The painting seems to glow from within, as hues and tones subtly shift across the surface.

Fish’s approach is grounded in perception rather than strict representation. As she has said: “I see light as energy, and energy is always moving through us. I don’t see things as being separated—I don’t paint the objects, I paint one after the other. I paint through the painting.” This sense of continuous movement is central to her practice, where light becomes the unifying force across various objects and surfaces.

Fish gives everyday objects- ribbons, glassware, flowers- a heightened presence, treating them with a kind of visual significance that elevates the ordinary. Pink Ribbon and Yellow Ribbon brings these concerns together with clarity and energy: it is both a celebration of material beauty and a sustained study of how perception is constructed through light, color, and surface.