Recalling Echoes

Hales is delighted to announce 'Recalling Echoes', Basil Beattie RA's third solo show with the gallery. In an exhibition of paintings and drawings made over the past decade, Beattie continues to explore a unique system of visual codes and painterly language with which he has become synonymous.

Over a sixtyyear career, he has carved out a process-based practice deeply concerned with the experiential qualities of painting. A pioneer of abstraction which emerged in post-war Britain, Beattie is known for gestural, painterly, monumental compositions. In non-figurative mark making, the artist's paintings have developed beyond his New York School predecessors to include symbols and signs.

Ever since a pivotal period in the late 1980s, Beattie has implemented simple motifs which have become a resource of infinite possibility. Beattie's triumphant use of a simple pictogram communicates not only an image from the real world but a profound experience. Referring to the "thing but only loosely", Beattie's paintings reveal what can be seen - the visible image, and what cannot - the field of energy which makes a painting potent. The latter speaks to a heritage of formal abstraction: the experiential, immediacy, physicality and scale of a painting remains at the forefront. The paintings mark a confluence of language and process. Beattie's paintings communicate a psychological state, 'The artist's inner life is encoded in the movement and substance of the paint.'[1]

This exhibition highlights one of Beattie's most enduring elements of his practice - stairs, steps, ladders and blocks. The artist's many manifestations of the stacked shape is both a painterly and philosophical project. Each rudimentary architectural element has individual characteristics which remain intriguingly familiar. The dynamic diagonal form divides the picture plane, as the eye travels from one corner to the other, implying journeys, progress and movement. However, in Beattie's paintings the stairs do not go anywhere, often stopping mid-air, the steps occupy an in-between. Obsessive repetition and variation of the emblematic steps has become a metaphorical vehicle, often reflected in the titles, as a mental link to another space.

Drawings remain a key foundation of Beattie's practice, manifesting what it is like to be inside his mind. In 1991, Beattie had a 'summer of drawing' leading up to a solo presentation at Eagle Gallery, London which marked a critical development of distinct expression. These drawings have been a resource he has mined ever since.[2] Drawings have been presented in many ways over the years, from covering an entire gallery space to stacked one on top of the other in a towering display. In exhibiting the works on paper together in Recalling Echoes, visual and cerebral connections transpire in new and exciting ways.

[1] Moorhouse, P. Basil Beattie, Taking Steps, Large Works 1986-2009, 2011, ArtNews Contemporary Art, p58

[2] De Ville, N., When Now Becomes Then: Three Decades, 2016, London: Hales, p5