John Beard: Other faces
At The Fine Art Society
28 November – 20 December 2007
A new series of strikingly dark and mysterious “portraits” of animals, humans, landscapes and architectural icons has been painted by John Beard for Other Faces, his first solo exhibition at The Fine Art Society at 148 New Bond Street, London W1 from 28 November to 20 December 2007. Beard, who was born in Wales but now lives and works primarily in Australia, has produced a collection of faces, both mythical and real, that have a common sense of stillness and silence and examine the ature of perception itself.
The 20 oil and wax on linen works exhibited will include Sheep, a startlingly beautiful face-on portrayal of a sheep’s head, and Gorilla, a reflective image of the world’s greatest ape half hidden in shadow. Sphinx, half man, half beast, spans the divide between the human and animal kingdoms, while Gandhi portrays Mahatma Gandhi, the bespectacled advocate of peaceful protest who played such an important role in bringing about Indian independence but at an incredible cost.
Beard says: “Most recently I have been working with and against the mitigated experience of an image captured on film to make paintings that examine the nature of perception, what is encountered externally and what is remembered and imagined internally – the formation of a concept arising from either or both.”
Beard was born in Aberdare in South Wales in 1943 and won a Welsh National Scholarship at the age of 19 before going on to the University of London and the Royal College of Art. He lectured for over 20 years in Britain and Australia and was appointed Head of Fine Art at Curtin University in Western Australia in 1983 but left teaching six years later to paint full time.
He has held solo exhibitions in London, Madrid, Lisbon, Porto, New York, Chicago, New Delhi, Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. Venues for his shows in
Britain have included The Tate Gallery, The Whitechapel Art Gallery, The Royal Academy, The Science Museum and The National Portrait Gallery. His most recent museum exhibition was a solo show at the Gulbenkian Foundation’s Centro do Arte Moderna in Lisbon.
He has won a number of major art awards in Australia, including the Wynne Prize for Landscape Painting, the Kedumba Contemporary Australian Drawing Prize and the
Paddington Art Prize for Australian Landscape Painting (all in 2006). This year he was awarded the prestigious Archibald Portrait Prize by the Art Gallery of New South Wales
for his painting of the installation artist Janet Laurence.
Beard’s paintings are collected by major international public and private institutions, including national and state galleries across Australia, the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon and the Tate Gallery in London. Beard is also represented in private collections in Britain, the USA, Canada, Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and India. He currently divides his time between Sydney and
London.
August 2007
Click here for works by john Beard |
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Sheep, 2007
Oil and wax on linen, 71cm x 71cm
Gandhi, 2007
Oil and wax on linen, 96.5cm x 96.5cm
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