Becky Beasley Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1975 -

Becky Beasley (b. 1975) is an artist who lives and works in Hastings, England. Beasley’s “sculptures and photographs, as mute and minimal as they appear, unexpectedly open onto literary worlds.”(Christy Lange, Frieze Focus). Beasley produces objects, photographs and texts which are typically informed by a deep engagement with literature — specifically in the past ten years certain writings of William Faulkner, Herman Melville, Bernard Malamud and Thomas Bernhard— and historical research.

She is interested in the ethics of dialogue and how to inhabit the spaces, works and lives of others in tandem with ones own through art. Editor Alessio Ascari once described her works as ‘mental objects’, the essential ambiguity of the word ‘mental’ here allowing for both the conceptual and the instinctual attitudes which are bound intensely into the center of her practice. Her practice is also concerned with spatial experience, in particularly the interior. She has developed a practice which explores the image and the limits of language. Through an abstracted grammar of the everyday, she sources personal experiences and literary references for moments of complexity and ambiguity.

Beasley’s work has been featured in solo exhibition internationally including, Tate Britain, Serpentine Gallery Pavilion (live work), Spike Island, Leeds City Art Gallery, Towner Art Gallery, 80WSE (Steinhardt, NYU) New York, South London Gallery (live work) and SKUC Gallery, Ljubljana. Group exhibition participation includes Bluecoat, Liverpool; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Kunstverein Munich and La Carte D’Après Nature, National Museums Monaco (Touring to Matthew Marks, New York), as well as three Arts Council Collection touring exhibitions, In a dream you saw a way to survive and you were full of joy, curated by Elizabeth Price; British Art Show 7: In The Days of the Comet and Structure and Material (with Claire Barclay and Karla Black). She is represented by Plan B Gallery, Berlin and Francesca Minini, Milan.

Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Artforum, Art Monthly, Frieze, Art Review and Flash Art International. Beasley was on the ICA Artist’s Advisory Committee in 2012 and was nominated for the Max Mara Prize in 2009. She has had five Paul Hamlyn Nominations.