New York,
Landscape was not introduced too early in the work of William Beckman (Maynard, 1942), one of the most representative painters of American figuration in recent decades; He was twenty-eight years old and he knew those he brought to his canvases almost like his own body: I started painting landscapes when we went to my parents’ farm in Minnesota. We were going, partly, on vacation, but also because I wanted to paint them. I had never made one—that is, not directly from nature—so I got on my father’s tractor, drove through the field and painted what was in front of me.
It was 1970. Growing up on a working farm left a fundamental mark on this artist, and the plowed fields, barns and machines would long be a source of creative concerns for him. He has pointed out that, if he lived in the east of his country, his concerns could have been different, but his imbrication in Minnesota and the knowledge of its ways of life half a century ago constituted the substrate of his work, based on observation of the immediate environment: It doesn’t appear very often in the Eastern press, but it does abound in the Midwest: the chemical fertilizers they apply to the soil, the way they cut down every tree or use a bulldozer to straighten a stream that meanders through a field, the way they run an electrical cable directly across otherwise productive land if they need electricity. And I fell in love with the large combine silos that are all over the area.
These landscapes from his youth, along with portraits of his close relatives, are the two legs of his creation and have been the subject of countless exhibitions in the United States and Europe; The next one will open on January 8 at the Forum Gallery in New York and will consist of fifteen oil paintings and three drawings, dated in the last six years, which we must interpret as an attempt at a portrait of a landscape, as an approach to a place that is part of the author’s life. The title of the project is, therefore, “Heartland” and emphasizes the ties between the land where he grew up and the values and sensibilities of those who inhabit it.
Two of the largest format paintings on the tour, two and a half meters wide, are Bundles #4 (2018) and Blue straw bales and plowed field (2024): these are memories of those enclaves that are familiar to him, but above all they immerse the viewer in the immensity of the domesticated land thanks to the communicative force and the emotional depth that Beckman has achieved in his compositions.
His usual portraits of couples and his looks at the surroundings converge, for their part, in the equally monumental oil painting Straw Bales (Coat Series)extraordinary image of the artist and his wife, with a certain defiant attitude, in front of the seemingly endless farmlands of the artist’s childhood home, which serve as their backdrop.
And another imposing self-portrait can be seen in New York: Coat with plowed field (2018-2021), in which he alone stands again before silos and farmlands behind him, wearing that coat that in his work, as in the winter field, acquires symbolism as an absolute refuge and means of survival. This work, like the previous one, evokes the famous composition American Gothic (1930) by Grant Wood, an Iowa painter who died just the year Beckman was born and whose journey cannot be understood without paying attention to the experience of his closest landscapes.
Both have something else in common: decidedly realistic and attached to agriculture and its ways of life, they imbued their scenes with atmospheres of mystery. Coinciding with Beckman’s last exhibition, in the spring of 2025 at the University of Arkansas, critic David Massello was right to point out that in his views there are plots that are not fully told to us, despite an evident closeness to the viewer: The viewer cannot avoid the impression that he is reimagining his youth home and metaphorically representing, from beginning to end, the course of his life. All of his works are thematically accessible, whether huge or tiny, and of undeniable beauty.
They are part of the collections of centers such as the National Portrait Gallery and the Hirshhorn in Washington, the Whitney Museum in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum or the MMK in Vienna.
“William Beckman: Heartland”
FORUM GALLERY
475 Park Avenue at 57th Street
New York
From January 8 to February 28, 2026
