Rick Beck

RICK BECK NOW

230 West Superior Street Chicago, IL 60654 | T 312.573.1400 F 312.573.0575 www.kensaundersgallery.com | info@kensaundersgallery.com Published by Ken Saunders Gallery 230 West Superior Street Chicago, IL 60654 www.kensaundersgallery.com Š 2014 Ken Saunders Gallery All Rights Reserved Printed and Bound in the United States of America 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 First Edition August 2014 Design by Deborah Kraft Photography by David Ramsey ISBN: 978-0-9885301-8-8

Published on the occasion of the exhibition RICK BECK: NOW September 5 - October 24, 2014

RICK BECK NOW

“He who works with his hands is a laborer.

He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.

He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.”

-Francis of Assisi Ken Saunders Gallery is pleased to present Rick Beck: Now and to document the exhibition with this catalogue.

In an effort to bring a sense of the artist and his intentions to his viewing audience I have produced this biography to accompany the catalogue. Beck’s work has been the subject of several essays and monographs and I want to express my appreciation to those authors whose views are cited in this text.

Rick Beck’s story begins as so many do with inspiring instructors and supportive parents. Taking full advantage of the opportunities that were afforded, whether drawing lessons or a college education in the arts, Beck pursued his passion for the studio and making things.

At Hastings College in Nebraska Beck worked figuratively in ceramic creating clean, minimal, nearly mechanical works. As he has throughout his career Beck was searching for a way of “bringing something new…find something in those figures that is more universal than arm, leg, shoulder and buttocks.”

In addition to working in ceramic, Beck engaged in life drawing and metalworking at Hastings. A roommate happened to be working in glass and invited Beck to the studio one evening because he needed assistance with a piece. Beck was immediately taken by the excitement and danger of the hot shop. The extreme challenges of working with hot-glass; doing hard, manual labor appealed to Beck’s sensibility as a individual maker. At the same time Beck found himself drawn to Art History where he was exposed to a diversity of influences. At first there was modern art from the first half of the 20th century and then when he realized that the artists he was looking at were themselves influenced by African art and artifacts he too searched African art for inspiration as he developed his own visual vocabulary, primarily in drawings and ceramic sculpture.

After completing his undergraduate degree at Hastings, Beck made an arrangement with the College to assist at the hot shop, tidying up and shutting it down each evening, receiving for his effort exclusive use of the studio after school was over for the day. For at least 4 hours every day for the next 4 years Rick blew glass at Hastings.

When he met Valerie, who was studying education, he insisted that their dates take place in the hot-shop where they would work together, the beginning of a partnership that included their marriage in 1986, and a lifetime devoted to working, living and making together. The early blown works that they created were vessel forms with sandblasted inclusions that reflected Beck’s growing interest in Abstract Expressionist painting.

In 1986 Rick began work on his Masters degree at South Illinois University in the program headed by William Boysen. It was at SIU, influenced by Boysen’s “democratic proclivities” that Beck learned how to build a studio, make tools and perhaps gain some insight into what it would take to make a life and career as an artist. Boysen’s directive was to find a way to survive to make the work by being frugal, clever and self-sufficient. For Beck these were the most important lessons imparted by his professor and for the first time the Becks began to support themselves by selling their work.

Upon completion of his Masters at SIU, Beck worked for a summer as a studio assistant at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. At the end of the summer Beck was invited to work as an Artist in Residence at the Appalachian Center for Crafts in Smithville, TN. Founded a decade earlier by visionary Tennessee Congressman Joe L. Evins the school aspired to create an institution that would celebrate and nuture craft traditions. For Beck the reality of his Residence was that when he arrived in 1989 the 10 year old hot shop was in need of a complete renovation, a task that consumed a great deal of his first year in Tennessee. Using the knowledge he had gained at SIU, Beck dove into the task of rebuilding furnaces, glory holes and annealing ovens. Beck traces his interest in mechanical objects and the melding at this time of his figuration with an aesthetic that referenced tools and hardware to his renovation of the hot ship. It was at ACC that Beck first cast nuts and bolts and his “threaded” figures.

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In 1991 came Beck’s greatest opportunity yet when the Penland School of Crafts invited both Rick and Val to be Resident Artists. Founded in 1923 as Penland Weavers and Potters and in 1929 officially renamed the Penland School of Handicrafts the sprawling campus on 400 acres now has over 50 buildings and courses are offered in a variety of craft disciplines including glassblowing, pottery, papermaking, metalworking, woodworking and weaving as well as fine arts subjects including painting, photography and printmaking.

The transition to Penland was difficult at times for Beck. The prevailing aesthetic at Penland was informed by technique and material, while Beck found himself “still making things as ugly as I could.” Beck had worked with extremely large kilns at ACC and had cast a variety of materials including glass and metal. In the studio Beck was not pursing technical mastery; the big kilns at ACC had forever altered Rick’s aesthetic. For the next 20 years Rick would be primarily concerned with scale and he would produce some of the largest sculptures ever created in glass.

The American Craft Council was founded in 1943 with a mission to support and nurture contemporary American craft. In addition to a magazine, American Craft, the Council produces juried expositions in several cities each year. At the 1992 American Craft Exposition in Philadelphia Beck’s work was discovered by two art dealers, Douglas Heller and Rick Snyderman and the artist was invited to have shows at Heller’s gallery in New York and Snyderman’s gallery in Philadelphia. Typical of the work at Snyderman were the large working screws and nuts while at Heller Beck presented the more figurative work including the threaded torsos.

In response to the challenge of presenting serious work in the gallery setting Beck began to create sophisticated and ambitious works that fused his figurative inclinations with a visual vocabulary informed by his intense wonder for all things mechanical and built. For the last twenty years Rick has moved back and forth between abstracted figuration and a lexicon of mechanical elements creating pieces that are more one than the other and pieces that are an eerie hybrid of both.

The artist’s large abstractions of hand tools invite smiles and laughter even as they solemnly evoke a time and sensibility that has passed. Ward Doubet, at the time the director of the Appalachian Center for the Crafts in Smithville, TN noted in his statement on Beck’s work in the catalogue for the 1995 Southern Arts Federation Craft Fellowships that Beck’s post-industrial monuments celebrate “ a work-bench culture whose influence is quickly diminishing in the information age.” 15 years later Matthew Crawford in his book Shop Class as Soul Craft urged the like minded,”to speak up for an ideal that is timeless but finds little accommodation today: manual competence and the stance it entails toward the built, material world.”

Indeed Beck’s monumentality requires that we contemplate the objects he “portrays” and the utility their forms embody. For a contemporary audience comprehending the usefulness or utility of these objects is more intuitive than definitive. Whether a Reamer, an Ax Head or a Turnbuckle it is the archaic tool-ness of these objects that is conveyed. Our fuzzy comprehension of the forms leads us to relate to the works on a wide range of levels. For the artist and many viewers the transformation from tool to figure provides the most resonance. For writers like Doubet Beck’s message is socio/political, the “iconography grounds the work in the concrete world of the craft studio as one of the last strongholds of individual, rather than corporate, creativity.” For Charlotte Vestal Brown, Ph.D., Ho. AIA, Director, Gallery of Art and Design, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, writing in the Autumn of 2001 issue of Neues Glas, “his tools are metaphorical references to a body language of multiple meanings having to do with purpose, work, power and sexuality.” Brown’s reading of the work reveals, as the critiques of deep and thoughtful artworks always do, the willingness to bring one’s own agenda to bear on the subject. She goes on to assert that, “these tools are not only symbols of a passing time in the factory but of the passing of the male body as an engine, a machine, a literally potent force in running the world.”

Rick Beck creates totemic glass sculptures that revel in the artist’s sense of humor, sense of place and sense of history. His sculptures ask us to reexamine how we appraise work and masculinity and reconsider the value of the accumulation of knowledge about the things we have built and that fill our world. Even as his reductive, minimalists sculptures are perceived to go places rarely explored by artists working in glass it is safe to say that Beck’s intentions remain firmly modern and firmly formal.

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Now 2014

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U-bolt 2012 80 x 20 x 16 inches

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Blue C-Clamp 2013 70 x 23 x 16 inches

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Static Casting 2013 70 x 30 x 16 inches

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Lag Loop 2012 81 x 23 x 16 inches

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Blue Sleep 2014 7 x 21 x 3 inches

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Clear Prostrate 2014 7 x 21 x 3 inches

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Green Recline 2014 7 x 21 x 3 inches

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Lavender Twist 2014 7 x 17 x 3 inches

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Hacksaw 2013 89 x 12 x 18 1/2 inches

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Limbsaw 2013 87 x 12 x 18 1/2 inches

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Saber saw 2013 87 x 12 x 18 1/2 inches

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2 Green Rocker 2014 17 x 52 x 7 inches

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Tectonic Plate Rocker 2014 30 x 28 x 9 inches

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Paper Fan Rocker 2014 11 x 24 x 7 inches

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Unnamed Amber Rocker 2014 11 x 48 x 4 inches

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Blue Composition Rocker 2014 33 x 36 x 10 inches

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Work 1989-2010

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Tombstone/Torso 1989 25 inches in height

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Untitled Grouping 1993 varying sizes

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Roughing End Mill Reamer 1994 25 x 21 x 12 inches

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Butterfly & Pin 1999 64 inches in height

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Dancer #2 2000 87 x 27 x 27 inches

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Dancer #3 2000 99 1/2 x 16 x 22 inches

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Red/Trinity 2001 41 x 32 x 11 inches

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Amber Ax Head 2003 60 x 30 x 7 inches

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Claw 2003 64 1/2 x 12 x 9 inches Spatula 2003 61 x 12 x 9 inches

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Turnbuckle 2004 120 x 24 x 48 inches

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Fertility Figure 2007 84 x 18 x 18 inches Diamondback 2007 83 x 18 x 18 inches

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Lotus 2007 70 x 24 x 12 inches

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Grace 2010 69 3/4 x 20 x 21 inches

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Blue Dreamer 2010 91 x 28 x 21 inches

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Rick Beck with his work, 1992

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SELECTED COLLECTIONS

Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, NC Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC Glasmuseum, Ebeltoft, Denmark Hickory Museum of Art, Hickory, NC Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC Mint Museum of Craft and Design, Charlotte, NC Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL Muskegon Museum of Art, Muskegon, MI North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA The Palley Collection, University of Miami, Miami, FL Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, NC

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Tectonic Plate Rocker, 2014 30 x 28 x 9 inches

$55.00