B A S I L...B E A T T I E

MARKING A YEAR

Marking a Year is a studio exhibition by the distinguished abstract painter Basil Beattie, which is shown in association with Emma Hill/ Eagle Gallery.

Beattie has been working on very large scale Paintings which have developed on from ideas shown in an installation at Sadler’s Wells in 2002 and he has found new departures in these works which are amongst the most significant of his career.

Recent major acquisitions of his paintings have been made by the Tate Gallery, London and the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester.

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."

Catalogue £8.00 available from the Eagle Gallery