Newman Popiashvili Gallery is pleased to present Tell It Slant, the first solo exhibition at the gallery of New York artist Helen Beckman. The title, a quote taken from a poem by Emily Dickinson, announces the value of indirectness that is a central theme in Beckman’s work.
Beckman’s work evolves from a response to an artistic tradition of representing figure within landscape. She considers civilization’s historical penchant for ordering and “improving” upon nature, from framing or echoing it with architectural elements to the actual repositioning of land in creation of beautiful vistas. Using imagery such as fences, balustrades, staircases and arches that “contain” and “order” the landscape, she riffs on this dialogue between man and nature.
Beckman’s paintings are populated with a variety of personal archetypes, both embracing and undermining the classic symbolism of horses, damsels, birds etc. References to natural decay and coarse repairs to past grandeur underline the pastoral drama.
Within this world, Beckman represents, both in image and in the application of paint itself, nature’s way of quietly pursuing its own plans. She modifies outlooks and shadows with adjustments of form and dissolution into partial abstraction, organizing the paintings’ composition by mysterious rather than obvious forces. The drama for her is to “tangle, cut and retie the relationship of the physicality of the paint and what it represents.”
The show consists of works produced within the past two years. The paintings are on wood panels, prepared with a traditional heated gesso, which allows an underpainting of gouache, usually ultramarine blue, to lie beneath an imprimatura layer and interact with the oil paint that covers it to varying degrees.
Beckman lives and works in New York. Her work has been shown at AC Project Room, PS 1, and Edward Thorp Gallery.
For further information or visuals, please contact the gallery.
Gallery hours are Tuesday though Saturday 11am - 6pm.
