New York, NY September 30, 2007 – Forum Gallery presents an exhibition by William Beckman, the artist’s first solo presentation since 2003. The show includes nine paintings and one charcoal drawing that explore the artist’s personal relationships, past and present.

Long recognized for his intense portraiture, William Beckman rose to prominence in the mid 1970s, introducing progressive American realism to an art world dominated by Abstract Expressionist and Pop art. Beckman moved to New York in 1969 and cemented his place in art history in the mid-1970s, when he was included in landmark exhibitions in the US and abroad alongside fellow realists William Bailey, Philip Pearlstein, Gregory Gillespie and Alfred Leslie.

Beckman’s paintings and drawings were included in the Seventy-First American Exhibition at The Art Institute of Chicago, IL (1974); Art Conceptuel et Hyperrealiste: Collection Ludwig at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France (1974); American Portrait Drawings, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, (1975); and Contemporary American Realism Since 1960, Curated by Frank Goodyear which traveled from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA; The Oakland Museum, CA; Gulbenkean Museum, Lisbon, Portugal; and to the Kunsthalle, Nuremberg, Germany (1981).

With a surgeon’s attention to detail, Beckman depicts the people and places closest to him: his family, his first home, and studio, all down to the last strand of hair on each head and smudge on every wall. The artist continues his often-brutal analysis in a series of self-portraits that stare frankly out at the viewer, chronicling his own changing appearance. Red, White and Blue, S.P., 2007, the artist’s most recent self-portrait, shows the top of his head cropped by the edges of the canvas, as though encased in his own painting. At the center of the exhibition is the larger-than-life, Studio No.3 (Ducati), 2004-5. At 95 x 80 inches, this is the latest in a series of studio self-portraits that demonstrate a personal evolution for the artist. In these works, the artist was initially placed next to his model, often his then-wife Diana. Progressively the model has moved out of the frame, as in the 2000-2001, Studio II, where she is presented halfway out of the painting. In this latest version of Beckman in his studio, the woman has been entirely replaced by the red metal of his Ducati motorcycle.

William Beckman attributes his inspiration for the flatness of surface, contrast of the colors, and the frank yet idealized depiction of subjects to masters of the Northern Renaissance. His labor-intensive technique involves extensive layering of paint, a building up of each section of the painting, while maintaining a flat, seamless surface. Each painting undergoes many revisions, as Beckman and his subject find their true expression in paint or charcoal.

Beckman has been the subject of 20 solo exhibitions, including Portraiture Now in the newly renovated National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC in 2006, and was the subject of a retrospective at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, WA, in 2002. The artist’s work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; and Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock.

The exhibition is accompanied by a full color 32-page catalogue, with an essay by critic and scholar Donald Kuspit. The opening reception will take place Thursday, October 11, 2007 at Forum Gallery, 745 Fifth Avenue at 57^th Street, from 5:30 - 7:30pm. The exhibition continues through Saturday, November 24, 2007. For more information please contact the Gallery.

CONTACT: Rachel Feinberg