Exhibition - William Beckman: On the Horizon

William Beckman (b.1942) is one of the country’s leading realist artists working today. Over his sixty-year career, William Beckman’s paintings and drawings of family members and the landscape of his youth have been the subject of countless exhibitions across the country and in Europe.

Now 82, William Beckman has spent the last six years concentrating on his landscapes. William Beckman: On the Horizon presents this new body of work for the first time. In addition, included in the exhibition are two outstanding examples of Beckman’s earlier “double-portraits” on loan from private collections. Together with Beckman’s latest larger-than-life double-portrait, Straw Bales (Overcoat Series), 2024 (86 x 138 inches), these works are revealing of the artistic concerns that have preoccupied William Beckman throughout his career, especially themes of survival, the individual, and life on the land. The twenty-two paintings and drawings in William Beckman: On the Horizon tell a uniquely American story and show how closely his values and sensibilities are tied to the land where he was raised.

Beginning in 1970, William Beckman has painted the landscape he knows as he knows his own body. Recalling a trip taken in that year, Beckman says:

The landscapes started when we went to my parents’ farm in Minnesota. We went in part for a vacation, but partly because I wanted to do some landscapes. I had never done any-I mean not directly from nature-so I just got on my father’s tractor and drove out in the fields and painted what was right in front of me.

Beckman is interested in the working farm and the plowed fields, silos and machines that make it so active and compelling. Further:

I wanted that hassle between the environmentalist and the farmer. It doesn’t surface very often in the eastern press, but you get it endlessly in the mid-west – the chemical fertilizers they put on the ground, the way they push down every tree or use a bulldozer to straighten out a stream that meanders through a field, the way they run a power line directly through otherwise productive land if they want electricity. And I fell in love with the big Harvester silos that are all over the area.

Forum Gallery has represented William Beckman since 1993. Works by William Beckman are included in the collections of National Portrait Gallery (Washington, D.C.), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.), Museum Moderne Kunst (Vienna, Austria), The Art Institute of Chicago (IL), Arkansas Museum of Art (Little Rock, AR), The Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh, PA), Flint Institute of Arts (MI), Milwaukee Art Museum (WI), Columbus Museum (GA), Des Moines Art Center (IA), and Frye Art Museum (Seattle, WA).

Location: Gallery One, the Fine Arts Building