Lisa Beck & Kevin Larmon

Where I End, You Begin

November 5 – December 23, 2016
Artist Reception: Saturday, November 5, 2016, 3 – 6 p.m.

Friends and colleagues for over three decades, New York based artists Lisa Beck and Kevin Larmon have shared an interest in exploring the relationship between abstract and referential imagery, with overlapping influences. Where I End, You Begin, a two-person show of their work opening November 5, 2016 at CB1 Gallery, celebrates the rare public acknowledgment of two artists who respect and support each other’s work with such mutual appreciation that they want to show it together, for the first time. The exhibition continues through December 23 and there will be an opening reception on Saturday, November 5 from 3 – 6 p.m.

Lisa Beck works with a variety of mediums and modes including painting, sculpture and installation, often in combination, integrating opposing but related visual phenomena, driven by certain preoccupations and obsessions that can be seen as divided between the particular and the universal. Her current work employs simple geometric structures and forms augmented with fluid, painterly color. The works take their form from the physical properties of the various media employed, with reflective materials serving as both a support and complement to painting. Lisa Beck’s work touches on the themes of inner and outer space, landscape, reflection, and the paradoxical relationship of something and nothing.

Kevin Larmon’s painting has received critical acclaim as a reaction to the evolving art trends of its time, while evoking historical ideas of painting and sexual identity. He envisions his painting as a creation of a complex life form, involving content, emotion, thoughts, dreams and libido under the skin of paint. Using different depths of engagement with materials, Larmon often incorporates macro photographic surfaces taken from art or pornography magazines or photographs of parts of his own body and that of his partner and model, photographer Rodrigo Pedrolli. Pedrolli also plays a part in the organization and selection of the images used in the collage. Larmon’s current body of work deals with cellular structures, semen, painterly euphoria and the orgasm, with the collaged photos becoming more prominent. Other themes explored are ideas of cars, lust, and social constructs.

Lisa Beck exhibited her work in the United States and internationally in venues including Galerie Samy Abraham, Paris; Feature Gallery, NYC; Paula Cooper Gallery, NYC; de Pury & Luxemburg, Zurich; PS1, NYC; White Columns, NYC; MAMCO (Musee de l’Art Moderne et Contemporain), Geneva; the New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT. In 2012-13, Endless, a survey show of Beck’s work including over 50 pieces from 1986-2012, was presented in Lyon, France at the Fort du Brussin Contemporary Art Center. In 2015, Galerie Samy Abraham (Paris) and La Salle de Bains (Lyon) with help from the Centre National des Arts Plastiques published The Middle of Everywhere, a monograph on her work. Her work is in the collection of the FRAC Pays De La Loire in France, Le Musee des Beaux Artes, Chaux les Fonds, Switzerland, and numerous private collections. Lisa Beck lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Kevin Larmon’s work is recognized as part of the post-conceptualism and neo-conceptual art movements, evidenced in exhibitions of the early 80s East Village Gallery Nature Morte and with critics/curators Tricia Collins and Richard Milazzo shaping the nature of painting after the rise of conceptual art. Larmon later was associated with Feature Inc., a gallery that was first established in Chicago in 1984, and eventually moved to New York City. His work is included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, University of Texas, Austin, among others. He is the recipient of an Atlantic-Pacific Fellowship and a Pollack Krasner Foundation grant. Larmon is an Assistant Professor and Program Coordinator Art, Design, and Transmedia in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University, New York. He lives and works in upstate New York. 

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