Artist Spotlight- Bianca beck

Bianca Beck was born in 1979 in Columbus, Ohio. Beck is an artist whose work begins with the body — from the imagined internal spaces of veins and organs to the dynamics of identity and expression. She favors distressed, punctured, encrusted surfaces, an earthy, at times visceral palette and painterly gestures that border on violence. Lacerations, smudges and sgraffito incisions attack the paint as if in a last-ditch attempt to extract imagery from recalcitrant materials.

Beck’s scruffy supports and mucky surfaces share with these artists an oxymoronic luxuriance in unprepossessing ingredients.  What is less immediately apparent in the younger woman than in the supremely history-conscious older painters is a way of reconciling studious awareness of precedence with a determinedly improvisatory expressiveness: knowingly making space for innocence.  Beck adopts a striking variety of approaches from piece to piece without a loss of personal style, managing simultaneously to bolster and destabilize authorial integrity.