THE ART PARTY - Timed Auction

Pamela Beck’s art practice is concerned with pushing the limits of abstraction. Her works are elegant, powerful, eye-popping, and optimistic; they’re distinctive at every turn. Through several series, she’s striven to capture light and motion. Following a successful career as a novelist, Beck approaches making art with the same interest in narrative that drove her forward in her former career, only she does it through visual means rather than words. What look like formalist abstractions are much more. Beck is interested in exploring concepts of the unseen. She makes visible that which you cannot see - time and space, and motion becomes palpable in Beck’s ever-changing vocabulary of color and geometry. Like expansive American 19th century landscape paintings of the west, with their infinite expanse of open space, Beck’s works give you the sense that they, too, could go on forever, and she simply cuts them as an abbreviation. 

When viewing a diptych or triptych, hung with swathes of space between panels, you feel as if you’re reading a story which takes a pause before it continues. It's fascinating the way you have to look at the work carefully to determine how they’re made, and even then, there’s an air of mystery. They may look like paintings, with their velvety surfaces, but they’re photos. Beck is secretive about her techniques, but she centers her work around photos she takes with an ingenious framing apparatus she’s created and assembled and a system of changing lights. Beck is like Edward Steichen, who waited patiently in the snow for hours for the right moment of light for his famous photo of the Flat Iron building. She does the same, often staying up into the small hours of the night waiting for the right moment to take the photo. Despite making art for only a short time, Beck has succeeded in coming into her own quickly, creating a unique vocabulary that distinguishes her work from others. Her insistence on pushing the limits of abstraction enables her to develop one new series after another and an exciting new body of work year after year.