A Life of Discovery: Works from The Allan Stone Collection | Contemporary Art Online
A Life of Discovery: Works from The Allan Stone Collection | Contemporary Art Online
Lot Closed
December 10, 05:44 PM GMT
Estimate
1,000 - 2,000 USD
Lot Details
Description
WILLIAM GEORGE BECKMAN
b.1942
UNTITLED
signed and dated 1970 internally
glass, mirror, paint and wood construction
12½ by 20 by 4⅝ in. (31.8 by 50.8 by 11.7 cm)
Please note that this work will be exhibited at Allan Stone Projects. Purchased items will be available for collection at Crozier Fine Arts, 1 Star Ledger Plaza, Newark, NJ as of Thursday, December 13th.
Allan Stone Gallery, New York
Boston, Sunne Savage Gallery, Thirty Years of Box Construction, November 1979
Washington DC, Middendorf / Lane Gallery, Tableau: An American Selection, September - October 1980
Seattle, Frye Art Museum, Painting on the Edge: The Art of William Beckman, August - October 2002 (erroneously titled Diana Pregnant #4)
New York, Allan Stone Gallery, World in a Box, March - May 2012
Since his first solo exhibition with Allan Stone Gallery in 1970, Beckman has established himself among his generation's elite hyperrealist painters, such as Richard Estes and Chuck Close, painting portraits of himself and those close to him, as well as landscapes, in gripping detail, employing a unique method of paint layers alternating with shaving and polishing to create lustrous, unvarnished surfaces. Beckman’s subjects wear expressions of poise and self-possession, mostly devoid of emotion but sometimes revealing traces of defiance, confrontation, disgruntlement or, occasionally, vulnerability. This rare work is from an early group of box constructions incorporating figuration within mirrored and sometimes electrically lighted vignettes. Beckman was included in the landmark Contemporary American Realism Since 1960, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1981, and he has had numerous gallery and museum exhibitions at such venues as the National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC, the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, the National Academy of Design, New York and The Columbus Museum. His works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Art Institute of Chicago, National Portrait Gallery and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, among others.