ART 3 gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition featuring works by Lawrence Beck, The Thickets Revisited. This exhibition is Beck’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. On view at ART 3 gallery, 109 Ingraham Street, Bushwick, Brooklyn. The show opens on February 11 through March 26, 2017. Gallery hours: Wed-Sat. 12-6PM, Sun. 1-5PM. The opening will take place on Sunday, February 19, 2017, 1-5PM.
The large scale black and white photographs shown in the exhibition at ART 3 are from the series titled Thickets (2003-2005) that Beck shot locally upstate New York during a few Winters. Those works were originally exhibited at Sonnabend gallery in 2005. With Thickets, Beck creates precise compositions that pay particular attention to light, always preferring a soft, diffuse illumination, and shoots his images on film to produce effects distinctly different from those of familiar digital snapshots. Yet the “nature” that Beck finds often comprises a manmade mise-en-scène of carefully stage-managed spaces.
As Michel Cone expressed perfectly in her review of the work in Artnews in June 2005: "The clarity of these photographs is astounding, as if they have been retouched by hand. What seduces most is the soft winter sunlight that shows through the tangled webs. It falls obliquely on tree trunks, vines and leafless branches, conveying stillness and peace. In the "Thickets" series, many images reveal an uncanny connection between Beck's latest landscapes and the spaces of Abstract Expressionism..." (as seen in ArtNews, June 2005)
Beck is known for his work, the Italian Gardens that concentrates on a landscape that incorporates masterpieces of Italian architecture, ranging from structures by the famed Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio (Villa Pisani I) and buildings in the Palladian Style, to the Gardens of Ninfa, the Appian Way, and the Roman aqueducts. Beck creates precise compositions that pay particular attention to light, always preferring a soft, diffuse illumination, and shoots his images on film to produce effects distinctly different from those of familiar digital snapshots. Yet the “nature” that Beck finds often comprises a man-made mise-en-scène of carefully stage-managed spaces.
Lawrence Beck was born in New York in 1962 and graduated from SUNY, College at Purchase, in 1984. His work is included in the Morgan Stanley collection. The artist was represented by Sonnabend Gallery in New York until its close.