Robert Beck
Robert Beck

“Following the clues won’t lead to a culprit or motive, but it will remind you that art, at its best, is an unsolved mystery.”  — Robert Beck, The New Yorker, March 13, 2000.

Robert Beck is the eponymous first monograph of the artist’s work.

Rather than offer a simple documentary compendium of Beck’s drawings, photographs, sculptures, videos, and installations of the past decade, this artist-designed book insinuates a narrative around evidence of contested source and shrouded causality. Issues of family and ritual, trauma and expurgation, innocence and experience, fact and fiction, memory and memorial, and adolescence and identity interweave both the work represented and the book presentation. Beck’s series of works, including the Thirteen Shooters, the Gun Pads, and the Trap Drawings, bind personal history with contemporary culture’s fascination with youth, violence, true crime and media exploitation.