Archive 2007-08
Basil Beattie
- Venue: Fine Art Lecture Theatre
- Start: Wed, 17 Oct 2007 12:00:00 BST
- End: Wed, 17 Oct 2007 14:00:00 BST
Basil beattie is one of britain’s most distinguished and respected painters,“whose work is 'abstract' in its concern with materials and technical procedure - but uses repeated symbols, especially stairs and tunnels, to create the very different tensions and moods evoked by the titles. He speaks of the blank canvas around the painted ideogram as a 'place to breathe' rather than as 'space'; his art is the visualisation of states of mind, in which images are more compelling or calming than words."
John McEwen
The Sunday Telegraph, 16 September 2001
In a catalogue published for the exhibition a text by Nick de Ville traces recent developments in a career that has spanned more than forty years. De Ville notes Beattie’s early links to abstract expressionism and a continued adherence to a belief that meaning be engendered from the physical impact of the work itself but he positions Beattie as a pivotal figure in contemporary practice through an ongoing development of a distinctive pictographic language:
“ ... Beattie attempts to hold his pictographs in the archaic moment when representation coalesces out of gesture. They are the trial components of a language of building at the birth of the possibility of signification, and it is in keeping with the physicality and materiality of his work that they should hint at a language of shelter and dwelling which is thoroughly secular in outlook. They suggest the potential to signify; to be grouped together in the beginning of coherence, but this possibility remains clouded, a tantalising prospect."
Nick de Ville