Peter Blum is pleased to announce the exhibition, John Beech, Recent Sculpture and Large Scale Drawings, opening on May 19th, 2005 at 99 Wooster Street, New York.
For the last 10 years John Beech has lavished attention on seemingly innocuous objects such as containers, bumpers and dumpsters and, by changing their context, has developed a new visual language that fuses the utilitarian object with abstract art. The works challenge us playfully to extend our ideas of traditional art terminology; to question what a painting is or what a sculpture should look like. The intention is to allow us to look with fresh eyes at the everyday objects which are the subjects of his works. Thus John Beech attaches wheels to blankets and calls them "Rolling Blankets," he projects his paintings at 90 degrees to the supporting wall, and what he terms a container actually contains painted surfaces. The "Container Sculptures" are prominently featured in the current show with two new large pieces.
The current exhibition includes "Dumpster Drawings" on a monumental scale that deliver the dumpster almost life-size to the viewer. These drawings, which are not drawings at all, but mounted photographs, feature photographed dumpsters that have been subsequently coated with paint. This process abstracts the dumpster and lends it the qualities of sculpture: mass, density and weight. The effect is also to flatten out the three dimensionality of the photographic image.
John Beech's work is currently on view as part of a major exhibition: The Natalie and Irving Forman Collection at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY. His recent solo exhibition, from December 5th, 2004 to March 31st, 2005 at Stiftung für Konkrete Kunst in Reutlingen, Germany, featured works from 1989 to 2004.
John Beech was born in 1964 in England. He graduated in 1986 from the University of California, Berkeley, CA. Awards include the Pollock-Krasner Foundation award in 1999 and the Chinati Foundation Residency in 1998.
John Beech lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
