New York, NY – From October 5 to November 11, 2017, Forum Gallery will present an exhibition of ten new works by William Beckman. The five oil paintings and an equal number of large-scale charcoal drawings included, all completed since the Artist’s last one-person exhibition in 2014, are a return to nature for the Minnesota-born Beckman, who was raised on his parents’ working farm. The farm and its resident bulls and horses are the subjects in the current exhibition.
From 2008 until 2014, William Beckman’s principal concern was the creation of The Bull Series, ten large scale charcoal drawings of bulls. These drawings were published in Forum Gallery’s 2014 catalogue, The Bull Series, and several were included in the 2014-2015 exhibition, William Beckman Drawings: A Retrospective, at the Columbus Museum (GA) and the Arkansas Art Center (Little Rock, AR). The current exhibition at Forum Gallery expands on his passion for rural landscape and its animals: the principal oil painting in the exhibition, Paint Box, 2016-17, oil on canvas, 114 by 138 inches, is a portrait of a powerful paint horse on the family farm. Horses are also the subjects of the large-scale drawings in the exhibition, while the smaller-scale paintings depict the landscape and different breeds of bulls.
Power and intensity are the language of William Beckman’s work, and he achieves corresponding measures of each in works ranging from 20 by 18 inches to nearly 10 by 12 feet in size. Working and re-working each element, William Beckman does not release a work of art from his studio until he is fully satisfied with the strength of the composition and image he seeks to achieve. His paintings and drawings compel the attention of the viewer through the use of bold color, dramatic, confrontational composition and dynamic eye contact. The dominance of the sky in the low-horizon landscape of hay fields and the bulls and horses seen at close range dominate the viewer with scale and strength.
William Beckman’s paintings are included in the permanent collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington; The National Portrait Gallery, Washington; The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington; The Des Moines Art Center; The Milwaukee Art Museum; The Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; The Minneapolis Institute of Art; The Flint Institute of Arts, Michigan; The Museum Moderne Kunst, Vienna, Austria; and many others throughout the United States and in Europe.
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William Beckman New Paintings and Drawings opens with a reception for the artist on Thursday, October 5, 2017 from 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm, and will be on view through Saturday, November 11, 2017.
Forum Gallery is located at 475 Park Avenue at 57th Street, New York, NY 10022. The exhibition begins on October 5, 2017 and will be on view through November 11, 2017. Forum Gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 am to 5:30 pm. For further information, contact the gallery. A full-color catalogue is available from the gallery.
For more information, please contact Kevin Dao, 212-355-4545; kevin@forumgallery.com