Walead Beshty

Walead Beshty was born in London in 1976, of Libyan father and American mother, and grew up in Pennsylvania; he lives and works in Los Angeles. Beshty studied at the Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson NY, where he earned his BA in Studio Art in 1999, and at Yale University School of Art, New Haven CT, where he obtained his MFA in Photography in 2002. Though his practice uses a variety of mediums, Beshty was principally interested in photography, specifically its materiality and development as a photographic image, and photography’s relationship to reality.

Beshty’s numerous series and photograms evidence how slight variations in technique—such as exposure or colour processing—can affect even the most systematic of mediums for capturing reality. Though visually abstract, Beshty has re-introduced the term “concrete,” suggesting his images are not alienated from life but are in fact, the result of specific technical procedures and structural conditions. Through photography, sculpture, curation, and extensive critical writing, Beshty draws attention to photography’s formal qualities and historic contradictions, critiquing and politicising the implicit ‘neutral’ framework of the medium. It is to create, as Beshty says, “a mode of production that is neither a cynical re-celebration of the dismantling of photographic meaning, nor an anodyne and amnesiac revelry in photographic spectacle.”

A Partial Disassembling of an Invention Without a Future: Helter-Skelter and Random Notes in Which the Pulleys and Cogwheels Are Lying Around at Random All Over the Workbench (2014) at London’s Barbican Centre negotiated the proposition of transparency within the politics of aesthetics, in which power can be withheld by concealing its process of production as much as revealing it. A chronological, salon-style installation of photograms across the Barbican’s Curve gallery sought to, as Beshty described, ‘turn that idea of total disclosure into the product. It’s a work that self-narrates, but because there’s an excess of information, the narrative is both totally transparent and totally incomprehensible.’ The duality of visibility and invisibility is also chartered in series such as Island Flora (2005), colour photographs of highway vegetation in liminal spaces typical unobserved by passers-by, and Travel Pictures (2006-08), photographs which include marks of X-ray damage caused by photographic material transitioning through airport security. The markings of industrial operations are also exposed in Beshty’s FedEx works (2007-) in which glass sculptures are ‘FedExed’ to their destination and displayed atop their packing boxes, exposing their damage during travel. Beshty’s work continues to hinge on social or commercial labour, bearing the material effects of specific active systems as well as deconstructing cultural information.

Beshty is an Associate Professor in the Graduate Art Department at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. He has also taught at numerous schools including: University of California, Los Angeles; the California Institute of the Arts; School of the Art Institute of Chicago; University of California, Irvine; and the MFA Program at Bard College. Selected solo exhibitions include: Walead Beshty: Standard Deviations, Kunst Museum Winterhur, Switzerland (2020), Industrial Portraits, Fondazione MAST, Bologna, Italy (2020), Walead Beshty, Musée d’art modern et contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland (2019), Picture Industry: a provisional history of the Technical Image 1844-2018, LUMA, Arles, France (2018); Aggregato, Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples, Italy (2018); Walead Beshty, Great Hall Exhibition, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, New York NY (2015); A Partial Disassembling of an Invention without a Future: Helter-Skelter and Random Notes in which the Pulleys and Cogwheels Are Lying around at Random All over the Workbench, Curve Gallery, Barbican Centre, London, England (2014); Fair Use, Power Station, Dallas TX (2013); A Diagram of Forces, Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, Sweden, and Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid, Spain (2011). His work was included in the 56th Biennale di Venezia (2015); the Tate Triennial (2009); and Whitney Biennial (2008).

Selected curation includes: Picture Industry: A Provisional History of the Technical Image, 1844–2018, Luma Foundation, Parc des Ateliers, Arles, France (2018); Picture Industry, Bard CCS Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudon NY (2017); Picture Industry, Systematically Open? New Forms for Contemporary Image Production, Luma Foundation, Parc des Ateliers, Arles, France (2016); A Machinery for Living, Petzel, New York NY (2014). Beshty’s work is included in numerous museum collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago IL; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles CA; Guggenheim Museum, New York NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago IL; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco CA; Tate, London, England; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY.