The fifteen oil paintings and three drawings on view in the exhibition show how closely William Beckman’s values and sensibilities are tied to the land where he is from.  Beginning in 1970, William Beckman has painted the landscape he knows as he knows his own body.  Recalling a trip taken in that year, Beckman said:

"The landscapes started when we went to my parents’ farm in Minnesota.  We went in part for a vacation, but partly because I wanted to do some landscapes.  I had never done any—I mean not directly from nature—so I just got on my father’s tractor and drove out in the fields and painted what was right in front of me."

The two largest landscape paintings in the exhibition, Bales #4, 2018 (73” x 99 ½”) and Blue Straw Bales and Plowed Field, 2024 (72” x 99”) are expansive recollections of the Artist’s homeland that bring to life for the viewer the experience of the vastness of the land in painterly expressions commanding the communicative strength and emotional power for which Beckman is known.

Growing up on a working farm left an indelible impression on the Artist, and the plowed fields, granaries, and machines that make the farm so active and compelling have long been an artistic preoccupation for William Beckman.  Additionally, Beckman recalls, “I wanted that hassle between the environmentalist and the farmer.  It doesn’t surface very often in the eastern press, but you get it endlessly in the mid-west–the chemical fertilizers they put on the ground, the way they push down every tree or use a bulldozer to straighten out a stream that meanders through a field, the way they run a power line directly through otherwise productive land if they want electricity.  And I fell in love with the big Harvester silos that are all over the area.”

Couples and landscapes have long been dominant ideas in William Beckman’s work, but in this exhibition, a new evolution of these themes is unveiled in the monumental oil, Straw Bales (Overcoat Series), 2024 (86” x 138”), a remarkable portrait of the Artist and his wife.  For the first time in a figurative painting by William Beckman, the defiant husband and wife stand against the backdrop of the seemingly endless farmland of the Artist’s western Minnesota childhood home.

William Beckman is well known for his self-portraiture, and included in the exhibition is the large-scale painting, Overcoat with Plowed Field, 2018-2021 (100” x 73”). The work is an imposing self-portrait in which the Artist stands steadfast wrapped in the iconography of the “overcoat,” a recurring symbol of survival for Beckman. With the farmland and silos behind him, he renders himself immovable, evoking the work of Grant Wood, painter of American Gothic who, like Beckman, sprung from America’s heartland.

Forum Gallery has represented William Beckman since 1993.  Works by William Beckman are included in the collections of National Portrait Gallery (Washington, D.C.), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.), Museum Moderne Kunst (Vienna, Austria), The Art Institute of Chicago (IL), The Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh, PA), Flint Institute of Arts (MI), Milwaukee Art Museum (WI), Columbus Museum (GA), Des Moines Art Center (IA), and Frye Art Museum (Seattle, WA), among others.