Bianca Beck: Body

Bianca Beck
Body
October 30 – December 23, 2011
Opening Reception: Sunday, October 30, 6-8 pm

Rachel Uffner Gallery is pleased to present a show of new work by Bianca Beck. For her first solo outing at the gallery, the artist will exhibit oil, ink, and charcoal paintings as well as small-scale oil-painted wood sculptures. Beck’s works explore the act of making as both violent and generative – giving rise to the artwork’s body while also establishing the expressive, corporeal agency of its creator.
Going at her pieces percussively and aggressively, Beck engages in an idiosyncratic version of action painting that links her to performance artists and musicians such as Ana Mendieta and Patti Smith. Her ripped and torn canvases, imbued with what she calls “body colors” – such as red, brown, and black, as well as “spirit colors” – such as purple, gold, and silver bring Beck into a visual arts lineage with artists including Jean Fautrier and Miriam Cahn.

Beck’s tendency to tear, carve, and burn the wood and canvas on which she paints echoes the ephemeral quality of materials and of mortality itself. This is especially apparent when Beck opens up the two- dimensional picture plane to the realm of the sculptural, in which her creations stagger upright, balancing between creation and destruction. These paintings and sculptures form a body of work that is, first and foremost, a body, one that refuses fixed meaning or formal closure, preferring to stay wildly – even abjectly – alive.

Bianca Beck’s work was recently featured in a solo show at New York’s White Columns, as well as in group shows at New York galleries Cheim & Read, West Street Gallery at Harris Lieberman Gallery, Laurel Gitlen, and Renwick Gallery. She has also exhibited in Madrid, Detroit, and Chicago. She lives and works in New York.