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. Buck is a contemporary artist and teacher known for his canny use of materials, ranging from traditional art supplies to such freighted readymade materials as mortician’s wax, gunpowder, and forensic latent fingerprint powder. His diverse practice resides in his training as a filmmaker, that is, montage, a technique that utilizes the cut and contingency. Recurring themes in his art include, subjectivity, violence and sexual difference. In 2008 as a work of art Buck changed his given, or father’s, name by a single vowel from Beck. Not long after, he bought a remote off grid cabin along the U.S.-Mexico border south of Marfa, Texas. There he creates work occasioned by the isolation, quiet, austerity and timelessness of the land. In 2019, Buck received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award. Beck had a major 2007 solo exhibition dust at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH. He was a 1999 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award recipient. In 1995, Beck was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (Printmaking/Drawing/Artists Books) and an Art Matters, Inc. grant. Buck has been Art Editor of The Lacanian Review since 2018. 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. Buck lives and works in New York City and far West Texas.
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