Ocula Conversation Almine Rech-Picasso Goes Global French gallerist Almine Rech-Picasso opened her first space in Asia on Shanghai's historic Bund in July this year, bringing her eponymous gallery's total locations to five. The Shanghai gallery occupies roughly 4,000 square feet on the second floor of the three-storey Amber Building, a beautiful warehouse space, originally occupied by the Central...
Ocula Report From the Gallery to the Streets: Home Works 8 in Beirut 8 Nov 2019 : Nat Muller for Ocula There's an inside joke amongst the team of Ashkal Alwan, The Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts: that every time an edition of its biennial forum on cultural practices is planned, a national crisis happens. The eighth edition of Home Works was no different: it opened on 17 October amidst the most devastating wildfires that Lebanon had witnessed...
Ocula Insight | Video Hans Hartung and Art Informel at Mazzoleni London (1 October 2019-18 January 2020) presents key works by the French-German painter while highlighting his connection with artists active in Paris during the 50s and 60s. In this video, writer and historian Alan Montgomery discusses Hartung's practice and its legacy.Born in Leipzig in 1904, Hans...
Born in Birmingham, England in 1971, Helen Beard is an artist who works in various disciplines including paint, collage, tapestries and sculptures.
Beard’s paintings use a vivid rainbow palette to create interlocking arrangements of bright primary colour, which combine to describe explicit sexual encounters. Working from found images, Beard’s work explores themes relating to gender, sexual psychology and eroticism. Situated part way between abstraction and representation, her figures are reduced to concisely defined fields of vibrant colour, on which a myriad of varied brush marks remain visible. As a feminist, she is unapologetic for female desire and takes back ownership of sexual imagery from the predominantly male gaze. The work is, at heart, a celebration of the life affirming nature of sex.
In 2017 she was included in the group show Simulation Skin: Selected works from the Murderme Collection and in the Spring of 2018, Beard was included in True Colours, a show of new works by three women artists at Newport Street Gallery, London. Beard’s work was also included in the show 21st Century Women curated by Jane Neal and Fru Tholstrup last Autumn in London.
Her work is in included in major collections worldwide.
She lives and works in Brighton, England.
