Becky Beasley

Galeria Plan B is pleased to present the second solo exhibition of Becky Beasley with the gallery.

H. S. P. (or Promising Mid-Career Woman) is a coming-out exhibition by mid-career British artist Becky Beasley. H. S. P. expresses the joys and complexities of an entirely autistic life understood only in retrospect. Through the sensitivities of photographic, ceramic, and linen surfaces, the three centrepieces of H. S. P. are installations through which the paradoxes of the human need for intimacy manifest in alternatives that have become Beasley's trademark minimal approach to art making. How to live, how to speak, how to be together, how to be alone.

H. S. P. – an acronym for Highly Sensitive Person - is a lyric to sensitive surfaces and to the highly individual process of being a person in the world. The insistence of individual presence is expressed in the reverse printed negative - often present in Beasley’s practice, - but here expressed repeatedly, insistently across the exhibition. BACK!, she insists. BACK! BACK! BACK! BACK! BACK! BACK!

The reprise of Beasley’s last show at Galeria Plan B, ‘Depressive Alcoholic Mother’ (2018), in the form of the linoleum floor-work, Highly Sensitive Person, is an intentional déjà vu. The slight disorientation therein offers a tangible, uncanny experience of her own experience of late-diagnosis autism in the winter of 2020. Her personal research over the last two years led her deep into the fields of international medical negligence in female and hormonal healthcare and the ongoing misdiagnoses of atypical neurology.

Undiagnosed progesterone intolerance and masked autism. Words are so clean. How do the societal effects of this manifest individually? Debilitating depression, serial burnout, exhaustion, stigmatization, bullying, gas lighting, social death - not being experienced by others as a person - social exclusion and bewilderment. Being endlessly bewildered by others is terrifying. To be bewildered is, etymologically and experientially, to be sent into a wild place without road map. It is to be astray in oneself. Beasley describes her late autism diagnosis as ‘possibly one of the strangest of happy endings’– not exactly happy and certainly no end.’

A collaborative text written by Becky Beasley and Anna Gritz to accompany the exhibition will be available from the gallery.

Becky Beasley (b. 1975, UK) is a mid-career artist who has participated in numerous international exhibitions, among them 80WSE Gallery (NYU), New York; Towner Gallery, Eastbourne; South London Gallery, London; Leeds City Gallery, Leeds; Spike Island, Bristol; Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, London; Tate Britain, London; Stanley Picker Gallery, London; Whitworth, Manchester; Bluecoat, Liverpool; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Kunstverein Freiburg; Kunstverein Munich; Kunsthalle Bern. She received a Paul Hamlyn Award in 2018.