Basil Beattie is a highly respected British painter, having exhibited in London and Europe since 1958. Over the last few decades his large and inventive abstracts have increasingly adopted a system of pictographic signs; doorways, stairways, archways, ziggurats, corners and long tunnels. Beattie sees these more as psychological states, rather than an illustrative or figurative association. However these architectural and archetypal forms comprehensively define the interior of the paintings, forming cells of space, depth, light and air.
Beattie's work spans a 50-year period and he has influenced a generation of young British artists through his years of teaching painting at Goldsmith College, London in the '80s and '90s. He is represented in many major collections in the United Kingdom, including the Saatchi Collection and the Tate Gallery. A solo exhibition of his paintings was held at Tate Britain from February to May, 2007.
James Hyman Fine Art will be staging a major exhibition of large paintings by Basil Beattie, to coincide with the publication of a new book on the artist, in autumn 2011.
As a student at the Academy Schools in the late 50s Beattie was influenced by the American Abstract Expressioinsts . Since then his work has been distinguished by his sensuous and physical use of paint - characteristics which he shares with the Abstraction as practised by other English painters such as John Hoyland, Albert Irvin, and Gillian Ayres.
In the late 60s and into the 70s Beattie was preoccupied with making paintings where there was no trace of the hand. These works showed an acute awareness of the work of Morris Louis and Jules Olitski.
It was in 1987, in his exhibition at the Curwen Gallery London, that Beattie's pictographic language began to evolve. This was followed in 1991 with a drawing Installation - Drawing on the Interior, at the Eagle Gallery London, consisting of 376 drawings. The work explored the emerging imagery, such as ladders, stairways, corridors tunnels, towers, doors, and ziggurats. Many of these images became subjects for paintings. Beattie has said of these images that they were not attempts to paint literal things, but were used as vehicles for conveying symbolic and metaphoric associations. The ziggurat triggered the Witness Series of paintings and a key work titled 'Present Bound'. The image of the ziggurat in this painting is the only part of the work which is painted - the rest of the linen is left untouched.
The language of the paint defining the image suggests a narrative of vitality and life, while remaining separated and isolated from the surroundings. A metaphor perhaps for a human condition.
Beattie's current paintings have the collective title of the Janus series. Janus the Roman
God, originally of light, who opened the sky at daybreak and closed it at sunset. In time, he came to preside over all entrances and exits. He is often represented as having two faces, one in front and one behind, one to see into the future, and one to see into the past. In this series Beattie uses a stack of three units, sometimes four, to frame a series of horizons, often with perspectival suggestions of travel and journeys. However any resulting illusion of space is contradicted by the raw physicality of the paint. It has been suggested the framing units resemble rear view mirrors and windscreens. Beattie recognises and accepts these references simply because the view through the windscreen might be said to denote the future and the view in the rear view mirror, the past.