Kate Beck

Katherine Beck is an abstract painter known for large-scale surfaces heavily imbued with motion and light, gestural layers of color that simultaneously float, anchor and rest amidst demanding, transitory mark.  Her latest works often contain a surprise of known motifs – abstract shapes and forms reminiscent of objects, people and places in her life.  Asserting concepts of memory, lith nature and obscure social presence, Beck holds tight to the surface, suppressing an uneasy premise of chaos, while suggesting conflicting possibilities of order and disorder, always within a grounding of place.  

In his 2011 catalogue essay, Kate Beck, the Potential of Line, Piet Augustijn, Curator Emeritus of Contemporary Art at the Gorcums Museum in Gorinchem, The Netherlands, writes "… [Her] paintings appear as poetic impressions of colored perception, interpretations of a personal experience of nature created from within and resulting in oases of inner calm and contemplation, but also of mystery, reminiscent of the pigment sculptures by Anish Kapoor, subtle poetic works with strength, fragility and infinite depth of color... ".    

Kate has studied journalism, art history and painting at the University of Maine, Bennington College, Goddard College and Maine College of Art.  She has exhibited and lectured in the United States and Europe, including Portland Museum of Art; New Mexico Museum of Contemporary Art; Gorcums Museum, Nederlands; PIT Project Space, Nederlands; ParisCONCRET Projects, France; Brito.Rodriguez Arquitectura, Portugal; Stiftung Konzeptuelle Kunst, Germany; and BAU Institute, Italy.  She has been collected within the United States and Europe.