Bianca Beck

Uffner & Liu is pleased to present Eyes, a solo exhibition of new paintings and monumental indoor sculptures by Bianca Beck. This body of work was shown earlier this summer in a solo presentation at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) in Rockland, Maine. This is Bianca’s 4th solo exhibition at the gallery.

Bianca Beck is well known for works that refuse the distinction between painting and sculpture, creating abstract forms that gesture towards the figure in papier-mâché that become three-dimensional supports for expressive marks. Covered in DayGlo pink and purple, acid green, shimmering cerulean, and jewel-toned blue, the combined force of their shapes and colors generates an intense, steely joy, suggesting hybrid descendants of Paul Klee, Joan Mitchell, and Keith Haring. Featuring three new works that loom over the viewer like benign sentinels or beloved offspring grown miraculously large, this exhibition opens a new chapter in Beck’s exploration of kinship, dissent, hybridity, and the plurality of selfhood.

Beck’s art can be understood as an expansive journey through the ethical and psychological dimensions of being with others—one informed by but not fully encompassed by their experience of queer parenthood in an un-gendered family. As the face-to-face encounter is a primary site of personal and ethical awareness—a place where we come to understand the dignity of others and the interdependence of our selves on and with the selves of others—Beck’s exhibition is an expression of a profound humanism in an inhumane time. At heart, these works are portraits that pursue the impossible task of rendering an entire lifespan all at once, from conception to childhood to midlife to death. Beck transforms the overlapping faces and visages of previous two-dimensional works into larger-scale three-dimensional works, their quiet benevolence evoking both Neolithic monuments and Cubist sculpture. In a conceptual parallel with the multiple viewpoints of Cubism and mobilizing negative space’s role in structuring sculptural presence, Beck allows multiple moments in time to unfold simultaneously, embracing a model of becoming in which nothing is lost, merely transformed.

—Grant Wahlquist, Curator and Interim Director at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art

“The human form is always in transformation—moving, aging, growing, shrinking, shedding skin, and changing. As the site of all experience, our bodies hold our own histories, as well as that of each other. We are here because of everything that has come before, and we each have the power to impact what is to come.”

—Bianca Beck

Bianca Beck (b. 1979, Columbus, OH) earned an MFA from Yale University, New Haven, CT (2008) and a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA (2001). The artist’s work has been recently exhibited at institutions including the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME (2026); the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, KS (2025); Summit Public Art, Summit, NJ (2025); The Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, VT (2024); Museum of New Art, Portsmouth, NH (2022); Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art and Design (2021); and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA (2021). Beck currently has semi-permanent outdoor sculptures on view at Texas Woman’s University, Denton, TX; the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, KS; Summit Public Art, Summit, NJ; and Art Omi Sculpture Park, Ghent, NY. They are a recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including the Helen Winternitz Award for Excellence in Painting at Yale University, New Haven, CT; The Ox-Bow School of Art Fellowship Program, Saugatuck, MI; and Artist-in-Residence at Complimenta, Ithaca, NY. Their work is in the permanent collection of the Dallas Art Museum, Dallas, TX,; the Rachofsky Collection, Dallas, TX; and the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, KS. Beck lives and works in Portland, ME.