They are not just black and white photos. The subject matter is urban: city streets, industrial sites, alleyways, warehouse facades. Within them is the accumulated flotsam and jetsam of human life in a city: dumpsters, random pieces of abandoned furniture, bits construction equipment. But each photo is also ground for the artist's intervention: blobs and washes of paint, ink marks, strips of tape.
We humans take things for granted: a street, a chair, the passage of time. How long since you really saw that alley, that tree? The Photo-Paintings and Monotypes of John Beech do just this. They challenge our preconceptions, providing the jolt, the pause, that invites us to pay closer attention. These works confound our sense of what a photo is, what a painting is, and how we see art and the world. "Across the Surface" provides a survey of Beech's Photo-Paintings and Monotypes from across the decades and dovetails with the announcement of a new book about this particular body of work forthcoming from Radius Books i
