White Room: Bianca Beck

White Columns is proud to present the first solo exhibition of recent paintings by the New York-based artist Bianca Beck.

In 2010 curator Joe Fyfe included Bianca Beck’s work in his exhibition ‘Le Tableau’ at New York’s Cheim & Read gallery. ‘Le Tableau’ took as its departure point the somewhat murky legacy – at least within the U.S. –of such post-war European abstract artists as Fautrier, Hartung, and Riopelle, whose work collectively suggested a negation of what Fyfe termed “resolved” painting. He suggested that these artists, and others like them, were collectively involved in “a dismantling of the picture-object that at moments resembled an evisceration of the very body of painting” itself. In ‘Le Tableau’ Fyfe aligned such historical affronts towards the painting-object with more contemporaneous interrogations of painting’s self-reflexive aspect inc. responses as different as those of Cheyney Thompson, Richard Aldrich and Merlin James, among others.

Among the youngest artists featured in ‘Le Tableau’ Beck’s work was curiously perhaps the most closely aligned with that of Fautrier’s generation. Eschewing formal closure Beck’s work appears as if entropic, as if the process of its “evisceration” remains in flux. Enlivened by burns, scratches, and other actions, the surfaces of Beck’s paintings are evidence of events both physical and psychological. Embracing abjection as a potentially liberating force, of the ten recent paintings on view in White Columns’ Project space only three are titled, two of which – ‘Newborn’ and ‘Death Painting’ – ultimately allude to the corporeal and visceral nature of her approach, and, perhaps, to our own inevitable mortality.

Bianca Beck (b. 1979) was recently included in ‘I Live My Thoughts’ (2010, Laurel Gitlen, New York) where her work was presented alongside that of Josh Brand and anonymous examples of early 20th Century ‘memory ware.’ Her work was also included in ‘Le Tableau’ (curated by Joe Fyfe, 2010, Cheim & Read, New York); ‘The same sight slighter’ (2010, Renwick Gallery, New York); and in earlier exhibitions in Madrid, Detroit, and Chicago. Beck lives and works in New York.