In Person: William Beckman | Alan Magee | Alyssa Monks

In Person William Beckman | Alan Magee | Alyssa Monks

In Person William Beckman | Alan Magee | Alyssa Monks Nov emb er 27, 2020 – J anuary 9, 202 1

Forum Gallery NEW YORK

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Montana, 2020 oil on canvas 58 x 104 inches

William Beckman William Beckman is one of America’s foremost artists. His powerful fgurative paintings and self-portraits, expansive landscapes and farm scenes refect his Midwestern roots, his personal life and his six decades as a working artist. Beckman’s latest works adhere to the Artist’s perennial themes while touching new territory as well.

William Beckman joined Forum Gallery in 1993. In 2006, his portraits were the subject of a one-person exhibition at the opening of the newly-situated National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. In 2014–15, Beckman’s drawings were honored with a retrospective exhibition organized by the Columbus Museum in Georgia, which traveled to the Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock. His work is included in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery (Washington, D.C.), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), the Museum Moderne Kunst (Vienna, Austria), The Art Institute of Chicago, (IL), The Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh, PA), the Flint Institute of Arts (MI), the Milwaukee Art Museum (WI), the Columbus Museum (GA), the Des Moines Art Center (IA) and the Frye Art Museum (Seattle, WA).

Montana Study, 2019 oil on panel 8⁷/₈ x 23³/₈ inches

Bales # 3 , 2019 oil on panel 24 x 39 inches

S.P. w/I-P , 2019 oil on panel 23³/₄ x 19¹/₂ inches

Bales # 7 , 2020 oil on panel 7š/₄ x 12 inches

Alan Magee Feeling acutely the anxiety of our current times, Alan Magee revisits subjects he has long explored in a poignant metaphoric insight for today’s world. Beginning in 2019, Alan Magee has created nine powerful paintings of helmets, armor and weaponry that art scholar and author Eleanor Heartney describes as “works of mourning . . . (at) a moment in our life and in our time where there is great sadness.” Shown with his extraordinary new paintings are Alan Magee’s haunting monotypes that the Artist has created over decades. More than a testimony to Magee’s highly refned and diverse artistic abilities, the monotypes confront the viewer with faces that Heartney likens to the Tibetan Buddhist notion of the Bardo, “a state of existence which is halfway between death and rebirth and you have these souls...striving and struggling, and not really quite sure who they are. They remember a bit of their past, (and) they don’t know where they are going to in the future.”

Alan Magee has received awards for his painting from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the National Academy of Design. In 2003–04, the artist was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition, organized by the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME, which traveled to the James A. Michener Art Museum, Bucks County, PA, The Museum of Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, and The Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA. Works by Alan Magee are in many public collections, including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Arkansas Art Center, the DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA, the Huntington Museum of Art, WV, and the Columbus Museum of Art, OH.

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Helmet VI, 2019

acrylic on canvas 72 x 50 inches

photograph by monika magee

Helmet V, 2019

acrylic on canvas 72 x 50 inches

Helmet IV, 2019

acrylic on canvas 40¹/₈ x 50¹/₈ inches

Silence, 1995

monotype with watercolor and black pencil 14 x 11 inches

Memoir, 1990

monotype with watercolor and black pencil 14 x 11 inches

Alyssa Monks Alyssa Monks: Plant Life presents seven new paintings created entirely during the Covid-19 quarantine in New York City. “We have all been ‘planting ourselves’ wherever we are and staying put,” Monks remarks.

The new paintings, with their intense but distorted color, portray the inner psychological experience of isolation for these female subjects as they interact with the “natural” world as it gets less and less certain or safe. Alyssa Monks’ expression of life in these new paintings is a direct refection of the Artist’s determination to remain positive and proactive during a global pandemic that has threatened both life and emotional well-being.

Monks’ paintings have been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions including “Intimacy” at the Kunst Museum in Ahlen, Germany, “Peers & Infuences,” at the The Bo Bartlett Center in Columbus, GA, and “Reconfguring the Body in American Art, 1812–2009” at the National Academy Museum of Fine Arts, New York.

Her work is represented in public and private collections, including the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, and The Center for Contemporary Art. Monks has been awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant for Painting three times and was invited to give a TED talk at Indiana University in November, 2015. The artist’s paintings and drawings were shown on the set of the FX series The Americans during the sixth and fnal season in 2018. Most recently, Monks was awarded a solo exhibition at The Bo Bartlett Center in Columbus, Georgia.

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Accept the Unacceptable , 2020 oil on panel 12 x 18 inches

Infnite, 2019

oil on linen 40 x 40 inches

Aerosol, 2020 oil on panel 18 x 12 inches

Wane, 2020

oil on linen 36 x 36 inches

Stay Open, 2020 oil on panel 18 x 12 inches

Forum Gallery 475 Park Avenue at 57th Steet, New York, NY 10022 (212) 355-4545 forumgallery.com

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