FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Robert Beck/Robert Buck Works Presented in Back Room at Erin Cluley Gallery

[Dallas, Texas] ERIN CLULEY GALLERY is pleased to announce a presentation by artist ROBERT BECK/ROBERT BUCK in the gallery’s back room space, opening on Saturday August 25, 2018, at 414 Fabrication Street, with a reception from 6:00 - 8:00 p.m. and on exhibit through September 22.  The show is presented in partnership with Takako Tanabe’s Ulterior Gallery, New York and will be on exhibit when Buck visits the Fort Worth Modern on Tuesday, September 11, for a guest lecture presented by Tuesdays at the Modern.

Robert Beck/Robert Buck will exhibit selections from three bodies of work from his trans-disciplinary practice: Kodak Instant photographs (1979-80); a “diagnostic drawing” (2007); and Cell (Winter Mimicry 0.1) (2008). The three series exemplify his abiding investigation into identity and interpretation, and the ways they are ciphered by artistic materials, ranging from traditional art supplies to non-art materials.  Taken after Beck moved to New York City in 1978, the Kodak images capture a moment staged by the artist, vignettes from a larger narrative of youth, burgeoning creativity, and self-invention.  From 1997 to 2007, Beck executed a vast series of works on paper, examples of psychological tests, referred to clinically as “diagnostic drawings,” which are used to calibrate, and often prescribe, a subject’s personality, usually a young person. 

Also featured are several Cell (Winter Mimicry 1.0) works, relief-like clusters of interlocking hexagons, printed hydrographically with a trompe-l’oiel pattern of tree bark and twigs, moths and pupa. The honeycomb formations infer a web of interconnected but increasingly isolated individuals, able to camouflage and morph their identities.  In 2008, Beck altered his surname by one letter, e to u, Beck to Buck. Precipitated by his artistic development, this small but dynamic change allowed the artist to reconceive his artistic self, and challenge our notions of art making, authorship, identity, and patriarchy.  He effectively bypassed the system structured by the Name-of-the-Father (the paternal figure of the law, so termed by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, that upholds patriarchal institutions, such as family, church, nation, and markets).

About Robert Beck/Robert Buck

Robert Beck graduated with a BFA from New York University, Tisch School of the Arts Film and TV Department in 1983, and the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art a decade later. He has been exhibiting nationally and internationally since the 1990s. In 2008, motivated by developments in his art making, Beck changed his last name by a single vowel, from e to u. Beck/Buck’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, CA; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Getty Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; and Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; among others. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Vestige / Second Hand, Ulterior gallery, New York, NY (2018); Strange Attractor, Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX (2017); Exposure, Angela Meleca Gallery, Columbus, OH (solo, 2016); Robert Buck: States of America, Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH (solo, 2016); and, in collaboration with Donald Moffett, Range: Experiments in New York, 1961 – 2007, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2017). Beck was born in 1959 in Baltimore, MD and moved to New York in 1978. Buck currently spends time in New York and far west Texas.

About Erin Cluley Gallery

Erin Cluley Gallery is a contemporary art gallery representing emerging, mid-career, and established artists from Dallas and the United States.  The gallery presents a provocative program of artists working in both traditional and alternative forms including painting, sculpture, new media, photography, sculptural installation and public intervention. 

The 2000 square foot space joined a creative movement in the Trinity Groves development at the foot of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge in West Dallas.  Erin Cluley Gallery has been in operation since 2014. 

Contact Lilly Neubauer at Erin Cluley Gallery: lilly@erincluley.com