Opening reception: March 24th | 4pm–7pm

Anglim Gilbert Gallery is pleased to present Under Way, an exhibition of new work by John Beech.

With reverence for materials and process, John Beech creates sculptures and paintings incorporating reworked elements from his studio with basic building materials like plywood, plaster, and metal brackets. For the artist, paint has broader implications than simply as a liquid vehicle for color. Rediscovered, repurposed remnants from other projects gain new life. Beech pulls from discarded scraps to build his Utiles, sculptures that tower upwards from a base on casters with particular intent yet unclear utility. Intra Paintings manipulate the liquidity of paint and its’ drying to generate abstract images as two paintings are pressed together and then pulled apart repeatedly. In the same series, but with the subtitle Closed Paintings, the paint itself is the mechanism binding together the double canvas compositions.

Beech further pushes the inherent qualities of paint and the idea of repurposing the discarded in a series of paintings. He includes dried scrapings from paint cans and uses plywood scraps as tools to apply paint, later leaving them stuck in the painted surface as additional layers of depth and visual information.

John Beech is a British-born American who studied art at UC Berkeley and has lived and worked in New York since 1996. In the last four years he has had solo exhibitions in the US, Switzerland, France, Germany, and Japan. He is a recipient of The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award (1999), The Chinati Foundation Artist in Residence, Marfa, Texas (1998), and the SECA Award, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (1992). Works by Beech are represented in the collections of the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, NY, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Oakland Museum, and Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland, among others. The gallery has shown Beech’s work since 1989.