Basil Beattie: Onward and Upward

James Hyman Fine Art is delighted to mark our representation of Basil Beattie by staging a major exhibition of large-scale paintings that span the last twenty-five years.

Building from his early engagement with Abstract Expressionism, in recent decades Beattie has increasingly adopted a system of pictographic signs; doorways, stairways, archways, ziggurats, corners and long tunnels. Despite their allusions to architectural spaces, Beattie sees these forms more as references to psychological states. Any illusion of space is also challenged by the raw physicality of the paint.

Beattie has also responded to conceptual ideas that place language at the centre of contemporary art practice and that question the importance of the expressive gesture in painting.

Basil Beattie's career spans the emergence of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1950s to a more recent emphasis on the ambiguities of sign and signifier in visual art practice since the 1980s. During this period his work has been distinguished by the sensuous physicality of the paint which parallels that of English painters such as Gillian Ayres, Albert Irvin, John Hoyland and Americans including Morris Louis and Jules Olitski. Beattie has also had a profound influence on a generation of younger British artists, in part through his years of teaching painting at Goldsmith College, London in the 1980s and 1990s. He is included in many major collections in the United Kingdom, including the Saatchi Collection and Tate Gallery. A solo exhibition of his paintings was held at Tate Britain in 2007. Beattie has been a prize-winner at the John Moore's Liverpool Exhibition, twice short-listed for the Jerwood Painting prize and was elected a Royal Academician in 2006. Beattie is represented by James Hyman Fine Art, London.

Basil Beattie
Onward and Upward
Twenty-five years of work (1986 - 2011)