Andrew Beck’s works are striking for their formal precision. His practice combines site-specific installation, photography and aspects of painting, and he is particularly well-known for his photograms (cameraless photography). Academic Christina Barton noted, ‘despite the analogue nature of his practice, Beck is the product of our digital era’.
He is embedded in a system in which actual space and present time blur seamlessly with a screen-centric domain in which images swirl, where distances collapse and multiple temporalities coexist. In this new condition the call to medium specificity seems redundant, for now things and their representations merge and blur; place and non-place, past and present fluidly intermingle. In this space the hierarchies of original and copy, surface and depth, a privileged real and its suspect other, pure idea and material substrate, are reordered or simply discarded. This is why Beck can both quote his artistic sources and redefine the tenets of their thinking.’
Beck was awarded the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation residency in Captiva Florida in 2019. His work is held in the collections of Victoria University Wellington, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and The Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Beck has exhibited widely in New Zealand and internationally and is regularly curated into important exhibitions including Emanations, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery; Trace of Existence, Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing and The Specious Present, Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Wellington. Beck lives and works in New Zealand.