A Gentle Man (Part II) (1975-2029) – A Touring Exhibition by Becky Beasley

“Art is not your life. It is somebody else’s.”

“Because you have the right to be obscure, first to yourself.”

This touring exhibition by Becky Beasley is a pastoral interior landscape with a gallery-sized pale green linoleum floor artwork, including a series of inset hand-cut linoleum lakes silhouettes and a décor that transforms the length of the gallery into an environment. Around the lakes, adjustable ‘conversation’ or ‘kissing’ benches -designed by the artist- provide a place to sit. What a relief it is to sit down! Artist Roni Horn wrote that rivers are for moving along, where lakes are for sitting beside.

Beasley’s small ceramic works sit discreetly on a series of ‘lakes’ tables which mirror the floor designs. Pastel pink linen curtains swirl slowly in circles on rails formed in the shapes of the letters, H, S and P., an acronym for Highly Sensitive Person. Elongated oak picture-shelves, on which groups of existing and new photographic works lean, frame the lengths of the gallery.

The exhibition includes a four-part video portrait of an imaginary figure – a merging of the intersecting lives American novelist and shorty-story writer, Bernard Malamud, and the artist’s father. The work explores milestone leaps of faith in life through its four discreet chapters: work, family, chosen family and dying.

So, what is a figure? What is it to figure something? To figure something out? To wonder, do I figure at all? And, if, so, how do I figure and who decides ?

“Here’s the person I want.

Hello person! Doesn’t hear me.”

Free entry. Opening times:
Thursday – Sunday: 12pm – Late

This touring exhibition has been commissioned by QUAD, Bluecoat and John Hansard Gallery with funding from the Freelands Foundation and Arts Council England. 

“Art is not your life. It is somebody else’s.”- Sullivan, R. D. (2018). Not you: Frank O’Hara and the poetics of ‘Personism.’ Textual Practice, 34(3), 419–436.

“Because you have the right to be obscure, first to yourself.”  Édouard Glissant, The Philosophy of Relation, not available in English

“Hello person…”  quote at the end-  Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things, Opening lines