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Bill Beckley
Artist Page
On March 20th 1969, Bill Beckley crossed the Delaware River on foot at the place where George Washington crossed it by boat so many years before. Although it was the Delaware River, the setting and the gesture suggested an affinity with the Henry Hudson River Valley School of painting. The accounts of his crossing, and the portrait of himself as Washington of the same year became early documents in the art of photo/text. Throughout the seventies he showed his narrative works in New York, at the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, The International Center for Photography, and the Whitney Biannual, and in Europe at Documenta and the Paris and Venice Biennales.
Beckley's recent work is without formal text, and has often been large-scale photographs of lily and poppy stems that bring to mind Asian alphabets. The first exhibitions of these works, called "Stations," took place simultaneously in Berlin, with Hans Mayer, and in New York, with Tony Shafrazi on September 14, 2001.
Most recently Beckley spins daisies with a remote controlled Lego motor. Like Whistler's blurred landscapes in the nineteenth century, and Rothko's abstractions in the twentieth, Beckley's blurred "Dervishes" introduce a twenty-first century thread into the fabric of the American Sublime.
Artist Page
On March 20th 1969, Bill Beckley crossed the Delaware River on foot at the place where George Washington crossed it by boat so many years before. Although it was the Delaware River, the setting and the gesture suggested an affinity with the Henry Hudson River Valley School of painting. The accounts of his crossing, and the portrait of himself as Washington of the same year became early documents in the art of photo/text. Throughout the seventies he showed his narrative works in New York, at the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, The International Center for Photography, and the Whitney Biannual, and in Europe at Documenta and the Paris and Venice Biennales.
Beckley's recent work is without formal text, and has often been large-scale photographs of lily and poppy stems that bring to mind Asian alphabets. The first exhibitions of these works, called "Stations," took place simultaneously in Berlin, with Hans Mayer, and in New York, with Tony Shafrazi on September 14, 2001.
Most recently Beckley spins daisies with a remote controlled Lego motor. Like Whistler's blurred landscapes in the nineteenth century, and Rothko's abstractions in the twentieth, Beckley's blurred "Dervishes" introduce a twenty-first century thread into the fabric of the American Sublime.
