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.      "...I made drawings as a child, all the time. I loved to draw boxes with white chalk on pavement, and then get inside the boxes, pretending they were walls, buildings and places I could be, expanding and retracting the lines until the spaces became just what I wanted. And then I would draw other things inside those boxes, too, and play for hours this way. It was very theatrical, actually, very modernist. I think these early times of relying on drawing with such ease and without question created a sense of discovery and truth, a validation, that became part of me, actually, a definition of my life.  I chose to look at drawings as a vehicle to transport myself to another more complex place.  I never questioned that. I never have.”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 "… [Beck’s 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... ".    Her influences include early Renaissance painters Jan van Eyck and Rembrandt van Rijn, abstract expressionist, color field painter Helen Frankenthaler, and contemporary artists Gerhard Richter, Brice Marden, Anselm Kiefer and Katharina Grosse. Beck has been a student of 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.  Her work is collected within the United States and Europe.