Learning from Dynasty

"Steeped in contemporary American culture, Robert Beck’s work is consequently stark, canny, violent, discrepant, and memorializing.  Personal and cultural confabulations ramify in an array of mediums, including drawing, photography, sculpture, installation, and video.  Misappropriating material excised from both popular and sub-cultural sources, Beck connives artworks that incorporate commonplace materials for uncommon ends.  In concisely “off-register” works, phenomenology and psychology are interchangeable.  Abiding themes, such as masculinity, language, epistemology, forensics, and sexuality, yield ultimately to the making of art itself, the consummate “how to”, a discourse of salvage.

After graduating from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts with a B.A. in filmmaking, Robert Beck studied art making at The Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program.  Both his videotapes and artworks have been exhibited in the US and Europe, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, and Neue Gesellschaft fur bildenede Kunst, Berlin, Germany.  In 1999, Beck received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, and in 1995 a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. In 2006, a survey of his work was shown at Opalka Gallery, The Sage Colleges, Albany, New York, and he exhibited with Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.  Beck lives and works in New York City.