NEW YORK – Next month the Walter Wickiser Gallery in New York City will present an exhibition of works from the late 1990s to the present day by Los Angeles-based artist Edward Beckett.
Eleven monotypes and paintings have been selected, themed around the artist’s career-long exploration of two themes: the intersection of art and music he has described as Visual Song and Questioning Time.
The show will run from January 4 through January 29, 2020. A reception on Thursday, January 9 (6-8 pm) will be held at the gallery in Chelsea’s historic Fine Art Building.
Beckett, a symbolic expressionist, has described his as work as “depicting the unseen elements of communication. These (spoken, unspoken, musical) elements include communication between one’s self and another, our community, our world, our fears, loves and ambitions; and between our perceptions and influencing factors.”
Beckett renders these subjects through four mediums — primarily printmaking, but also through ceramic sculpture, painting and iconography. His process uses a repetitive symbolic and consistent vocabulary as a composer uses rhythm and tonality “to capture mercurial, ephemeral, musical and/or percussive interchanges (seen, unseen and felt) and shape them into visual forms. If we can view the unseen, perhaps we can improve or appreciate it more.
Gordon Fuglie, Director, Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, points out that, “Beckett attempts in his paintings and prints a reinvigoration of the ‘marvelous,’ a notion that gave a charge to the early images of the Surrealists. He differs from them, however, in that rather than creating a new reality, he reckons directly with his time and place through symbols that embody the myriad possibilities and perplexities of communication.”
For additional information about the artist and this exhibition, contact the Walter Wickiser Gallery by calling 212-625-0601 or email wwickiserg@aol.com.
About The Walter Wickiser Gallery
The Walter Wickiser Gallery was established in 1992 in Soho. It has always been the focus of the Wickiser Gallery to create a visual dialogue between various cultures, and simultaneously reminds us of the ability of art to transcend cultural boundaries. Clients and visitors to the gallery have included Woody Allen, Betsy Bloomingdale, Kim Catrall, Leo Castelli, Michael Douglas, Alex Katz, Phillip Pearlstein, Sally Avery, Sarah Kuniyoshi, Ted Koppel, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Geraldo Rivera, Sam LeFrak and Paul Volker. Work by many of the represented artists have been exhibited at American museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the High Museum of Art in Georgia, the Dallas Museum of Art in Texas, and the new Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut.