Nathalie Karg is pleased to present Balancing Act, an exhibition featuring new paintings by Lisa Beck.
Artist Statement
The works presented in Balancing Act are selections from a new series begun early in 2023. As in much of my work, these new pieces involve doubling, symmetry, and pattern. In keeping with my long-standing practice of creating single works composed of multiple parts, these new paintings are all diptychs.
Each of these two-part paintings has a motif repeated on each of its panels. The relationship of the imagery and the placement of the panels vary from work to work. Motifs may form a continuous image or not, may align symmetrically or not. The panels may be touching or separated. They may be aligned or offset. The unusual hanging of the panels emphasizes the paintings’ objecthood and their interaction with their environment. The circle, prevalent in much of my work, appears in partial form, one of the players in a game of hide and seek among figure and ground, positive and negative. The imagery is minimal, while the paint application is mottled, layered, and unrefined. All the elements of these paintings, working together or in tension, combine in ways that come to various states of resolution.
The ultimate form of each painting is arrived at through decision and indecision, adding and subtracting, placing and replacing, intention, error, and chance. Each embodies one of many possible ways to balance image, object, alignment, and disjuncture. Each is a record of its making, in conjunction with or despite tension and opposition, in the search for connection and harmony.
-Lisa Beck
Lisa Beck (b. 1958, New York, NY) studied at the Rhode Island School of Design in in the late 1970s and has since been the recipient of several awards, residencies, and fellowships including the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program Studio Residency (2012-2013), the Yaddo Residency (2021), and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (2021). Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is held in significant public collections such as the Tang Teaching Museum of Skidmore College, Maramotti Collection, Italy, FRAC pays de la Loire, France, Museé des Beaux-Arts La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, JP Morgan Chase, Nestlé, and many private collections around the world. Her work has been reviewed in publications such as The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, The New Yorker, Vulture, Art Forum, and The New York Times among others. Beck lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
