ROCKLAND, ME.- Bianca Beck is well known for works that refuse the distinction between painting and sculpture, creating abstract forms that gesture towards the figure in papier-mâché that become three-dimensional supports for expressive marks. Covered in DayGlo pink and purple, acid green, shimmering cerulean, and jewel-toned blue, the combined force of their shapes and colors generates an intense, steely joy, suggesting hybrid descendants of Paul Klee, Joan Mitchell, and Keith Haring. Featuring five new works that loom over the viewer like benign sentinels or beloved offspring grown miraculously large, this exhibition opens a new chapter in Beck’s exploration of kinship, dissent, hybridity, and the plurality of selfhood.
Beck’s art can be understood as an expansive journey through the ethical and psychological dimensions of being with others—one informed by but not fully encompassed by their experience of queer parenthood in an un-gendered family. As the face-to-face encounter is a primary site of personal and ethical awareness—a place where we come to understand the dignity of others and the interdependence of our selves on and with the selves of others—Beck’s exhibition is an expression of a profound humanism in an inhumane time. At heart, these works are portraits that pursue the impossible task of rendering an entire lifespan all at once, from conception to childhood to midlife to death. Beck transforms the overlapping faces and visages of previous two-dimensional works into larger-scale three-dimensional works, their quiet benevolence evoking both Neolithic monuments and Cubist sculpture. In a conceptual parallel with the multiple viewpoints of Cubism and mobilizing negative space’s role in structuring sculptural presence, Beck allows multiple moments in time to unfold simultaneously, embracing a model of becoming in which nothing is lost, merely transformed.
“The human form is always in transformation—moving, aging, growing, shrinking, shedding skin, and changing. As the site of all experience, our bodies hold our own histories, as well as that of each other. We are here because of everything that has come before, and we each have the power to impact what is to come.”
Bianca Beck (b. 1979) received their BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and their MFA from Yale University. Beck’s solo and two-person exhibitions include Matéria Gallery, SPACE Gallery (with Sascha Braunig), Halsey McKay Gallery (with Susan Tepper), Uffner & Liu, and White Columns. Their work has been featured in group exhibitions at venues including the Shelburne Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA&D, the deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Art Omi, 56 Henry, the Kunst- und Kuulturstiftung Opelvillen Rüsselsheim, Andrew Edlin Gallery, Tif Sigfrids Gallery, Night Gallery, David Petersen Gallery, Brennan & Griffin, the FLAG Art Foundation, Misako & Rosen, Harris Lieberman, and Cheim & Read. Their work is in the collection of the Dallas Museum of Art. They live and work in Portland, Maine.
