Biography
Robert Beck was born in 1958 in Baltimore and came to New York City in 1978 to pursue filmmaking and cinema studies at New York University, where he studied with Annette Michelson. In 1993, he attended the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is a multidisciplinary artist recognized for his incisive use of materials, ranging from traditional art supplies to such non-art materials as mortician’s wax, ballistic nylon, latent fingerprint powder and industrial reflective paints. His holographic practice derives from his training as a filmmaker and know-how with montage, a technique that proceeds via the cut and adjacency. Prevailing themes in his work include, masculinity, violence, sexuation, identity and the American Southwest. In 2008, as an audacious work or act of art, Beck changed his given or father’s name by a single vowel to Buck. Soon after, he bought a small off the grid cabin along the U.S.-Mexico border south of Marfa, Texas, which he refers to as his “outerior studio.” There he creates work elicited from the austerity and silence of the land and solitude. Buck’s art can be charted by a constellation of influences, including artists Agnes Martin, Marcel Duchamp, Cy Twombly, Louies Bourgeois and Cady Noland, filmmakers Robert Bresson and David Lynch, novelist Cormac McCarthy, and the teachings of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. In 1995, Beck was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, in Printmaking/Drawing/Artists’ Books, as well as an Art Matters, Inc. grant. He received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 1999. In 2007, Beck had a solo exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH. Since 2018, he has been Art Editor of The Lacanian Review. His work is included in museum and private collections internationally. He is represented in Washington DC by Von Ammon Co. and in New York by Ulterior Gallery. His moving image works are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York. In 2019, Buck received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award. Buck lives and works in New York City and far West Texas.
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