Edward Beckett Exhibition

Walter Wickiser Gallery

This event has ended.

The Walter Wickiser Gallery presents an exhibition of works from the late 1990s to the present by Los Angeles-based artist Edward Beckett in January 2020.

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.

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 paints 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.”