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Press Release
Windows, glimpses into railway tunnels, rearview mirrors – the abstract paintings of Basil Beattie, born in 1935 in West Hartlepool on England’s east coast, invite free association. Stories quickly suggest themselves from the fragmentary symbols and forms: a view out of the rear window of a moving car; children following long-abandoned tracks; an escape from a cave and the disappointment of a broken rope ladder. Many of these narratives are marked by simultaneity: past and present collide, an uncertain future looms. Entire worlds grow out of the picture, almost flat and poster-like, as if incidental: sometimes a road, a horizon, sometimes a whole landscape. The characteristic muted palette is only rarely countered by an orange-shimmering ochre or a vibrating Berlin blue. Then one thinks one recognizes water, or identifies a desolate wasteland in rust red. Everything equally familiar and strange. The known and the unknown – a recurring dialectical figure in Beattie’s…
Exhibition Space
Press Release
Windows, glimpses into railway tunnels, rearview mirrors – the abstract paintings of Basil Beattie, born in 1935 in West Hartlepool on England’s east coast, invite free association. Stories quickly suggest themselves from the fragmentary symbols and forms: a view out of the rear window of a moving car; children following long-abandoned tracks; an escape from a cave and the disappointment of a broken rope ladder. Many of these narratives are marked by simultaneity: past and present collide, an uncertain future looms. Entire worlds grow out of the picture, almost flat and poster-like, as if incidental: sometimes a road, a horizon, sometimes a whole landscape. The characteristic muted palette is only rarely countered by an orange-shimmering ochre or a vibrating Berlin blue. Then one thinks one recognizes water, or identifies a desolate wasteland in rust red. Everything equally familiar and strange. The known and the unknown – a recurring dialectical figure in Beattie’s…
