Lisa Beck: Space-time
November 12, 2022 – January 7, 2023
Opening Reception for the Artist: Saturday, November 12th from 6:00 – 8:00 pm
Diane Rosenstein Gallery announces Space-time, a solo exhibition by Lisa Beck. The artist, who is based in Brooklyn, has shown her work extensively for the past forty years in New York and
Europe. We are honored to host Lisa Beck’s inaugural exhibition in Los Angeles.
The exhibition is comprised of new work as well as selected pieces from 2012–2019, including painting, sculpture, and installation, often in combination. Beck’s works will inhabit the gallery in a dynamic installation that includes floor placements; suspended sculptures and doublesided paintings; and works that take place in corners of the gallery.
Space-time embodies the idea that artworks can function as transcendental objects. Many of Beck’s works employ reflective materials such as mylar, mirror, aluminum leaf, metals, and polished acrylic. They look different from different angles as the viewer moves, highlighting the act of perception and providing a glimpse of the flux that is present behind the facade of solidity and continuity of matter. The circle, in all its many references – atoms, stars, cells, voids – is a frequent element in her work.
“If Lisa Beck’s work is about anything it’s about expansiveness, which can only ever conform to its own disregard for limits,” writes curator and art writer Bob Nickas in his essay for Beck’s monograph. Nickas considers the artist’s “endless fascination for all things round, radial and revolving, for circles, balls, marbles, globes, planets, spirals, waves, whirls, eddies and orbs. She knows that if you walk determinedly in a straight line from one end of the earth to the other you can only arrive where you began.”
Recently, Beck is adding objects to her paintings – attached onto the surface or dangling – that she has often found in the street, such as crushed aluminum pans or the lids of cans. Attracted to their circular form, she sees these various discs as random, quotidian reminders, that we are, in fact, living on a spherical planet, floating in space among other heavenly bodies. Other works have multiple layers of canvas, burlap, and linen, which have been cut to reveal what is beneath. The artist considers the physical tactile qualities of the materials used equal in meaning to the image-narrative.
Lisa Beck’s work connects to the visionary symbolism of American Transcendental artists such as Agnes Pelton and Charles Burchfield, the materialism of Arte Povera, and 1970s Minimalism. Scientific research is a source for her work, as is the theology of ancient Egypt. The title of the exhibition, Space-time, refers to physics and the conceptual model that combines the three dimensions of space with the fourth dimension of time. It accounts for the relativistic nature of phenomena, such as why different observers perceive where and when events occur differently – and refutes absolutes in both space and time.
The artist states, “I’m an artistic omnivore. I’ve always done more than one kind of thing at a time—paintings, sculpture, paintings combined with sculpture, installations, and murals. I am attracted to opposing phenomena like positive and negative, pattern and randomness, flatness and depth, depiction and abstraction. Much of my work has involved the integration of these opposites. In looking at [my artworks], viewers often start talking about skies, the moon, space, the sunset…but it’s also just lines, and color, and a circle or two. An artwork can tell more than one story at a time.”
Lisa Beck (USA, b. 1958) has exhibited her work in the US and Europe since the 1980s, including seven solo exhibitions at Feature, New York (1992-2012). Recent solo exhibitions include Always Now, at The Suburban, Milwaukee (2019) and Rising and Falling, Elizabeth Dee Gallery, NYC (2017). Her work is currently included in Parallax: Framing the Cosmos, at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum in Saratoga Springs, NY; and a two-artist exhibition (with Andrea Belag) at Kristen Lorello, NYC. She has participated in numerous exhibitions at venues including MoMA PS1, NYC; Musee d’Art moderne et contemporain (MAMCO), Geneva, Switzerland; New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut; and White Columns (NYC). Endless, a survey of Beck’s works from 1986-2012, was presented in Lyon, France (2012-13); and a monograph, The Middle of Everywhere, was published in France in 2015. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (1980), and is the recipient of several awards,
residencies, and fellowships, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (2021), the Yaddo Residency (2021), and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program Studio Residency (2012-2013).
Diane Rosenstein thanks Nathalie Karg Gallery for their assistance and support of this exhibition. For press inquiries or more information about the artist and works in this exhibition, please contact info@dianerosenstein.com
