‘Biscuit , I kept you half’ – Mall Galleries – London May 3013
Derby Museum
Fine Art Society – London June 2014
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Mall Gallery – London May 2013
Mayour’s Parlour Derby UK May 2013
Violet Hour- Memory & Desire
Bartholomew Beal – Painter
Trebuchet Magazine – Bartholomew Beal : Reflections on Contemporary Symbolism by Edward Lucie-Smith
The Resident – Meet Bartholomew Beal, art’s rising star
Jealous Print Studio: Bartholomew Beal
Port Magazine – hy I Love: The Waste Land, Bartholomew Beal
CITY AM: Why Bartholomew Beal is set be a future master
The Independent – Bartholomew Beal’s bold exhibition draws on TS Eliot’s The Waste Land
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Catalogue essays:
Bartholomew Beal: A Heap of Broken Images – Edward Lucie-Smith
Bartholomew Beal on London Live, 2016.
March – April 2016: Works exhibited in “In The End We Are All Alone” at Griffin Gallery, London:
January 2016: Works exhibited in “This Great Stage of Fools” at The Fine Art Society, London:
November 2015: Photographs from a studio visit with Edward Lucie-Smith and Jason Colchin-Carter, ahead of the Bartholomew Beal solo exhibition ‘This great stage of fools’ held by IPA on London’s Bond Street. Edward interviewed the artist in preparation for writing the foreward for the exhibition’s catalogue:
IPA Collaboration with Cynthia Corbett Gallery 2015-2016
Read The Resident article HERE.
Education2009 – 12 / BA Fine Art Painting, Wimbledon (1st Class Hons)
College of Art
Gloucestershire
Solo Exhibitions2016 / This great stage of fool’s , IP Arts collaborating with FAS, London
2015 / Bartholomew Beal – Temple, I.P. Arts, London
2014 / A Heap of Broken Images, I.P. Arts in collaboration with FAS, London
2013 / Saint Monday and Thereby Hangs a Tale, I.P. Arts in collaboration with Derby Museusm & Jonathan Vickers ,
Biscuit, I save you half – I.P. Arts @ Mall Gallery, London (with Eleanor Watson)
Art Fairs
2015 / Art Miami 2015, I.P. Arts with C.Corbett Gal, Miami
Farfetch, I.P. Arts, London
Young Master Dialogues, I.P. Arts with C.Corbett Gal, London and New York
Young Masters Prize, I.P. Arts with C.Corbett Gal, London
Royal Arts & Fashion, I.P. Arts @ Middle Temple Hall, London , I.P. Arts with C.Corbett Gal, Lo don
Art15, IP Arts in collaboration with FAS, London
Scope Art Fair 2015 , IP Arts with OS Gallery, Miami
Group Exhibitons2016 in the end we are all alone , IP Arts , Griffin Gallery, London
2014 / What Marcel Duchamp Taught Me, I.P Arts in collaboration with FAS, London
Art14, I.P Arts in collaboration with FAS, London
2013 / Memory and Desire Part 1, IP Arts @Theobald Jennings Gallery, London
2012 / FLOCK 2012
Wimbledon College of Art Degree Show, London
100outof10, Vyner Street Gallery, London
The Perfect Nude, Wimbledon Space | Exeter Phoenix | Charlie Smith Gallery, London
, Amsterdam
, London
2011 / , London
Last Orders
, Brick Lane Gallery, London
Baker’s Dozen, Acquire, London
AWARDS
Landmark Plc Fine Art Award
2011 / Finalist of the Hans Brinker Student
Painting Prize, Amsterdam
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Derby Museum July to Nov 2013 Catalogue
Derby Museum July-Nov 2013 – Installation Images
High Res Images of Works in Derby Museum Show July to Nov 2013
Video of Saint Mondays at Derby Museum July to Nov 2013
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Bartholomew Beal : Reflections on Contemporary Symbolism by Edward Lucie-Smith
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Derby Museum July to Nov 2013 Catalogue
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Derby Museum July-Nov 2013 – Installation Images
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High Res Images of Works in Derby Museum Show July to Nov 2013
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Video of Saint Mondays at Derby Museum July to Nov 2013
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Works exhibited in “In The End We Are All Alone” at Griffin Gallery, London:
http://jealousprintstudio.blogspot.com/2014/06/bartholomew-beal.html?m=1
Arranged and managed by Isis Phoenix Arts.
Last week we welcomed Bartholomew Beal in to the studio to sign his two new editions entitled Madame Sosostris and What Branches Grow. Completed for his solo exhibition, A Heap of Broken Images, at The Fine Art Society Contemporary, the prints will be on display until the 29th August 2014. Both editions were digitally printed on to Somerset Satin Enhanced 330 gsm paper and finished with a deboss around the image and deckled edge. – Jealous Print Studio
Isis Phoenix Arts media article by The Resident – thank you Resident!
@isisphoenixarts
‘The Resident’ magazine article & interview by Victoria Purcell. Arranged and managed by Isis Phoenix Arts. Read the full article here.
Artist Bartholomew Beal is one of Britain’s brightest new talents. Here he reveals the creative ideas behind his striking work. Words: Vicky Mayer
Behind the doors of a nondescript warehouse in the London borough of Lewisham lies the studio of rising star Bartholomew Beal. Like the man himself, it’s filled with energy, and a body of work that art fans around the world are adding to their collections. Not bad for a 25-year-old who only graduated from Wimbledon College of Art three years ago. Here, he shares the secrets of his success.
Good painting needs confidence so I start my work on a small canvas then if I’m pleased with what I’ve got, I go for it. I come from a literary family (both my parents are English teachers) and find that literature helps me with a starting point. In the past I have created a series of paintings around The Wasteland and I’m currently using King Lear as inspiration. Literature always gives me an extra reason to paint and a good point to start at.
Most of my paintings feature bearded men. There’s something dramatic about them. Some of the world’s most famous men – God, Jesus, Dumbledore – all have beards and the men in my work have a sense of drama and history. By painting a man on his own, it’s up to the individual to decide what the story is and everyone has a different interpretation of my work. I love that and also the fact that starting with literature, each piece of work has an extra dimension to it.
My subjects are solitary and melancholic. Like a play, they always seem to be in the middle of the canvas. I have tried pushing them to the sides but it doesn’t seem to work. I love working with big spaces and smaller figures, so sometimes I make the figures smaller to make the painting even more dramatic.
I find my models everywhere and anywhere. Sometimes I stop people in the street and take a photo of them but I also go to the theatre a lot and often find someone with an interesting face in a play. I also use friends and family in my paintings too. I do paint women, but older men with beards seem to be my signature style.
I love big, bright colours and want people to almost step into my paintings. I think bold colours give my work real energy. They also give them individual character. My paintings have been compared to those of Francis Bacon, Peter Doig and even Rothko, which I love, as I really admire their work.
I also love Antony Micaleff, Adrian Ghenie and Nigel Cooke.
I was the youngest artist to exhibit at the Fine Arts Society with my show, A Heap of Broken Images, and I knew I had to produce a work of art that deserved the space they’d given me so I worked from early in the morning till late at night. I’m ambitious and I work hard but there’s still so much luck involved in the art world. Some of my best friends are artists and damned good ones; they just haven’t had a solo show that’s got them noticed.
When I’m not feeling inspired I go to galleries, watch rugby or throw a frisbee around but at the moment I am working really hard on new work for my forthcoming exhibitions. I have two shows coming up in London and I will also be exhibiting in New York in May. I haven’t been there since I was 16 and I can’t wait to return.
See Bartholomew Beal on show: Jan/Feb 2016 solo show – Bond Street FAS. March/April 2016 IP Arts – Griffin Gallery, Notting Hill, 6 new large works. May/June 2016 IP Arts solo show – New York.
Isis Phoenix Arts media article by The Independent newspaper – thank you Independent!
@isisphoenixarts
Emerging artist Bartholomew Beal is staging an exhibition of bold paintings based on TS Eliot’s The Waste Land.
Beal’s A Heap of Broken Images is a translation of the famous poem onto canvas and will be on display at The Fine Art Society until late August.
A palette of vivid, saturated colour is used to heighten the drama and nuance of Beal’s artworks and ensure that “no passage is singular, static or empty” in a nod to Eliot’s style.
Subtle ‘ghost’ paintings can often be traced in the canvasses that are important fragments of the story, allowing Beal to mirror the multiple viewpoints, characters and languages found in Eliot’s landmark poem.
Beal says he aims to achieve a “healthy tussle” between referencing specifics from The Waste Land and surrendering himself to the unpredictable creative process.
The lone, generalised man in the middle of each painting leaves the artworks open to the viewer’s imagination with his changing surroundings offering hints and suggestions.
“My paintings are an attempt to translate mood and atmosphere through process and progress,” says Beal. “My paintings are sometimes an early stop and sometimes a long drawn-out effort to realise the original intention – a quiet figure within an under-described space.”
Beal graduated from Wimbledon College of Arts in 2012 and his paintings can be found in the Saudi Royal Family’s private collection.
His use of paint has been praised for its “seductive sparkle” by art historian Edward Lucie-Smith, with A Heap of Broken Images marking Beal out as the youngest artist ever to stage a solo show at the 138-year-old London gallery.
Bartholomew Beal’s A Heap of Broken Images runs from 24 June to 29 August at The Fine Art Society
Article by Jess Denham, The Independent – 7th July 2014: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/bartholomew-beal-s-bold-exhibition-draws-ts-eliot-s-waste-land-9589373.html
Arranged and managed by Isis Phoenix Arts. Media article by Port Magazine – thank you!
@isisphoenixarts
The artist ruminates on his fascination with T.S. Eliot’s most celebrated poem, and how it’s inspired his latest body of paintings
The Waste Land is a poem that I will never fully understand.
T.S. Eliot’s poem is the main drive behind my recent paintings, and the title for my current exhibition is a candid theft of one of the most striking lines – A Heap of Broken Images.
That title seems a brilliant description of this poem as a whole. It leads you into a situation or narrative, which abruptly stops in the middle, and jumps into another, each one drenched with references and connotations in multiple languages, but all tied into a strict economy of language.
The poem is dedicated to Ezra Pound, a contemporary poet and close friend of T.S. Eliot, and the opening of the poem pronounces,”Il Migglior Fabbro”, the better craftsman. It was Ezra Pound who was sent the draft, and cut it into pieces to shorten the poem even further, removing large chunks of each situation, to create a greater depth of perplexity for each reader, and leaving more lines untied. “A Heap of Broken Images” also falls as a perfect explanation of Pound’s editing, where the fragmenting of these already complex lines seem his key intention.
This is a wonderful challenge as a painter, and one that has kept this set of paintings changing every day as I study further. On the train to the studio, I might read a commentary on this poem that flips my perception of a word or stanza on its head.
This perhaps changes every colour in that painting, suggests a link to another, and quite often means it is painted out and started again, with only hints of that first reaction left to be seen.
‘Haunted’, for example, began as a brazen magenta painting, but layer after layer of new colours, images and figures meant that the atmosphere of that painting changed every other day, as new decisions were made. A photograph of England manager Roy Hodgson, found in the London Evening Standard in February/March, decided the figure and composition, but several heads or faces were painted on top of his as the painting changed.
Whilst I am no expert, with no credibility whatsoever on T.S. Eliot’s poetry, there is a basic reaction that means I will ask questions of this poem instead of just putting it aside. Both of my parents are English teachers, and I think that must give me some confidence (if only to have a reliable opinion to fall back on). My mother’s degree dissertation was a study of ‘The Waste Land’, and my father has always taken consolation in Eliot’s late poems – ‘Four Quartets’. I picked up that baton by writing my own dissertation at Wimbledon College of Art – ‘Ut Pictura Poesis’– discussing the relationship between contemporary painting and imagist poetry. Rebecca Beasley explains, “The thinking of Eliot, Hulme and Pound is largely responsible for shaping the modernism we have inherited”.
It seems his poetry provides those half-finished, frugal stories that I hope my paintings can translate. Those scribbled, first attempts of the old and newer masters are always so exciting, full of energy, and the mistakes and accidents make each one so accessible, to feel like you might be in the studio with Rembrandt instead of feeling reliant on art history in the Rijksmuseum.
I hope each one of mine leaves a gap to be filled, feeling unfinished, abstracted or even just messy. I am tempting the viewer to engage with that painting; trying to decipher it or make their own decision on what might be missing.
It is that which most intrigues me about ‘The Waste Land’, my attempt to untangle it, and impose my own opinion on each word or line. My paintings swing from quite a simple illustration of a character or scene, to a tenuous link to one of Eliot’s references, and that is why I love ‘The Waste Land’.
A Heap of Broken Images is being exhibited at the Fine Art Society, London 24 June – 29 August
Article from PORT Magazine, July 8th 2014: https://www.port-magazine.com/commentary/why-i-love-the-waste-land-bartholomew-beal/
Tuesday 29 July 2014
Media from ‘Heap of Broken Images’ – IP Arts managed exhibition for Bartholomew Beal.
Arranged and managed by Isis Phoenix Arts. Media article by CityAM – thank you Alex Dymoke ! @isisphoenixarts
“Figures stand isolated, lost in unfinished landscapes of saturated planes and floating shapes. Bartholomew Beal’s paintings are as open-ended as they are dramatic, as lurid as they are dark, as rich with meaning as they are ill-defined. At only 24, Beal is already a master of ambiguity. It should come as no surprise, then, that he chose TS Eliot’s The Waste Land as inspiration for his solo exhibition at the Fine Art Society. The paintings that make up A Heap of Broken Images refer to specific moments in the poem, but he doesn’t limit himself to literal renderings of Eliot’s words. The text is just a starting point, and Beal is open to the distortions and tangents yielded by the inherently unpredictable process of painting. The result is not just an illustration of a text, but a startling fusing of imaginations. As the youngest ever painter to have a solo show at the Fine Art Society, Beal looks set to be a leading figure among the next generation of British painters. A Heap of Broken Images runs until 29 August at The Fine Art Society. Pictured: A Heap of Broken Images by Bartholomew Beal ” – Alex Dymoke
From CityAM article: https://www.cityam.com/broken-images/
Beal passed on Boxing Day 2019, aged 30. His legacy is an incredible body of work from 2012 onwards, and an outstanding inspiration to his contemporaries.
Bartholemew Beal — Reflections on Contemporary Symbolism
The Europe-wide symbolist movement of the late nineteenth and earliest twentieth century never counted for much in Britain. Its major figures, at least insofar as the visual arts are concerned, were mostly of French, Belgian or Russian origin. Names such as Odilon Redon, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Félicien Rops and Jan Toorop populated the list. Plus those of the Russians Mikhail Vrubel and Nicolas Roerich. Also present is that of the great Norwegian painter Edvard Munch.
Though there were indeed British participants in the symbolist movement, the only British practitioner of the visual arts allied to it, and who also counted for something internationally, was the printmaker and illustrator Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley, in a meteoric career that lasted only a few years—he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25—produced images that influenced both Japanese art (from which he borrowed reciprocally) and also that of pre-revolutionary Russia. He was a disruptor and creator of scandals, and as a large retrospective at Tate Modern goes to some lengths to prove, his influence has been intermittently felt in popular art forms in Britain up to the present day.
There are also one or two ‘fine art’ descendants of the symbolist movement to be found in contemporary British art. Its impact can still be seen in the work of twenty-first century British artists who work in relatively conventional forms, such as painting. For example, in that of Billy Childish, one of the founders of the worldwide stuckist movement, which now has members in more than 60 different countries.
Childish left stuckism behind almost as soon as the movement came into being, and no longer wishes to be associated with it. He makes work that is internationally exhibited, though still largely ignored by official British agencies. What he produces shows clear influence from the work of Munch.
Another example, much less well known than he should be, is the painter Bartholomew Beal, who died on Boxing Day, 2019, of a brain tumour. He was 30, just a few years older than Beardsley. When one compares Beal’s work to Beardsley’s, one notes that he is much less radical, in terms of his response to the society he inhabits, than Beardsley was in his day. In the latter’s work there is a deliberate element of provocation; images of men with enormous erect penises, for example. This is absent from what Beal produced.
Yet there are also parallels. While neither Beal nor Beckett claimed surrealism as an influence on their work, there is a disjointed, eccentric, absurdist aspect of their work which ploughs similar furrows to the exquisite corpses games used by the movement in an approach to unlocking the imagery of the subconscious mind. Both artists were inspired by literature; Beardsley first by Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1893), then by Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485). Beardsley also took inspiration from the bawdy Ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata (411 BC) and Alexander Pope’s “Rape of the Lock” (1712). Often his purpose, in making illustrations, seemed to be to discombobulate the audience. His illustrations in Salome, the work with which he launched his career and which immediately made his reputation, offer a number of sardonic caricatures of Wilde, the author of the actual text. There are also images that have little to do with anything depicted in the work.
Some of Beal’s sources of inspiration, used for two major shows managed by Isis Phoenix Arts in collaboration with the FAS Bond Street in London, were T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” (1922),and Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear. Thus far, in his use of literary source material, he showed himself to be a disciple of his late Victorian predecessor, Wilde. However, his relationship with the material he chose is far more relaxed and fluent. The techniques he used, for paintings made in full colour, enabled him to make images that illustrate the processes of creative thinking, not simply a take-it-or-leave-it final result, which Beardsley’s graphic processes, images made for reproduction, inevitably demanded.
Where Beardsley set out to tease and to challenge, Beal offered a meditation about his chosen texts, and his own emotional reactions to them.
I would like to quote something here that I wrote in a brief catalogue essay for the first of these two Fine Art Society exhibitions:
‘Let’s enumerate some of the things that make [Beal’s] work—for me at least—particularly interesting. First, very obviously, there is the emphasis on the visual, the pleasure of the eye. In contemporary circumstances, artistic developments seem to offer a rhythmic oscillation between two different poles: what is visual, often to the apparent exclusion of any kind of intellectual content; and what is conceptual—a mere diagram or statement, intended to make us think rather than actually enjoy what we are looking at. There has also, increasingly, been an oscillation between what is material—things made of stuff (though often not of the kind of stuff we expect an artwork to me made of)—and the aggressively immaterial.’
To this I added:
‘What is very contemporary about these paintings is their use of the idea of the non-finito. Beal speaks of his “favourite treatment of paint siting decided figures next to elements of painting that are unfinished or ambivalent.” Essentially the spectator is asked to look at them, not as things already frozen in time, but as statements that are still in the process of evolving, capable of morphing into another form, or series of forms, the instant one looks away from them.’
The thought becomes particularly poignant when one considers that the paintings live on, while the artist is now dead.
In fact, the kind of paintings that Beal made now look particularly new and relevant, because of a growing sense of disillusion in the world of contemporary art, when confronted with the other kinds of visual art that are currently on offer. Tate Modern, for example, has, at the time of writing, just opened a new exhibition of work by Andy Warhol, who died in 1987. At the peak of his career, Warhol’s work represented the triumph of pop art, and with it the advent of a new set of values in art-making.
In her review of the show, Rachel Campbell-Johnson, art critic in residence at the Times, notes that: ‘In terms of his influence Warhol is probably the most important artist of the past half-century.’ This doesn’t mean, however, that she feels much empathy for what Warhol stood for: ‘Art production values are changing. Factory-style studios are fast disappearing… Artists are turning away from industrial production… The tactile, the handmade and the low-tech are in mode.’ What she prefers are ‘pieces that serve a purpose and deliver a message’. Campbell-Johnson cites, as a worthy example of this, the work of the architectural collective Assemble, who (she claims) won the 2018 Turner Prize ‘with a project that set out to improve an urban community’. (They were in fact short-listed, but didn’t win. The Turner, that year, was won by Charlotte Prodger, a Scottish artist who makes dinky little videos on her iPhone. But the mistake is informative.)
What the cultural establishment in Britain now longs for is a revival of quasi-Victorian values, where the artists who are in good standing with official agencies, notably the Arts Council and the various Tate galleries, are out there providing templates of social virtue, while at the same time making sure that their audience knows that this is what they are aiming to do. The war cry is: ‘Oh look at me; what a good little kitty I am!’
Beal had no interest in their crusade for social improvement, and none at all in soliciting merit badges for doing so. Yet, unlike Beardsley, who openly challenged Victorian values yet seemed to take little interest beyond that in exploring the image of the self, there is a constant note of questioning in his art.
This was already evident in his Saint Mondays show, exhibited in 2013 at the Derby Museum and Art Gallery, as the winner of the fifth Jonathan Vickers Fine Art Award. In a prefatory note Beal wrote: ‘Just as Joseph Wright [of Derby] commemorated the principal figures within the Industrial Revolution, which re-shaped the world, I chose my eccentric figures from folk music, poetry, old family archives and conversation. It was these people who defined the John Vickers theme: “A sense of place.”’
The catalogue for that show offers an illustration of a painting called You Exaggerate, facing a brief quote from Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame (1957). The quote begins with Clov’s line: ‘Oh, by the way, your story?’ and (not unexpectedly, since this is a text by Beckett) goes nowhere.
You Exaggerate shows a scrawny white-bearded man, arms raised, torso bare, standing behind a square plinth that conceals the rest of his figure. So much so that his legs may not in fact exist. Attached to the fingers of one hand by a dangling string is a plumb bob. Attached, in the same way to the fingers of the other hand, is an apple, or maybe some other fruit or root vegetable. The floor is a checkerboard of black and red squares. It is an extraordinarily eloquent, yet desolate image.
Another painting in the Derby show, a work entitled Alice in the Bacon Box, commemorated an elderly resident of Long Easton, on the outskirts of Derby, who between 1891 and 1911 lived in a bacon box. She is a close sister of the male figure portrayed in You Exaggerate.
As one looks through the images that Beal produced, one notes that he seldom chose to depict figures who could be considered members of his own generation or anything close to it. This preference seemed to strengthen as his work progressed. If one looks, for example, through the catalogue of his second show in 2016 managed by Isis Phoenix Arts in collaboration with the FAS Bond Street in London, one notes not only the title of the exhibition—This Great Stage of Fools, borrowed from King Lear—but also the figure of the aged king, standing with arms flung wide, on the cover of the catalogue.
Another theme, also linked to the text of Lear, is that of the Fool, the truth-teller who comments on the tragic narrative. Sometimes this Fool is presented not as a living figure, but as a puppet, a head without a body, on a stick. In one image, The Fool’s Marotte, it is the bearded king himself who appears mounted on the stick, a fringe of bells edging his garment where it abruptly ends. Subversion and carnivalesque role-reversal combine with the dreamworld illogic of surrealism to present a fudging of archetypes. Ultimately, there is little to distinguish between fool and king; each is superseded by his role, reduced to a talismanic puppet. It is the signifiers of their roles which endure, not the individual wearing them.
Looking at these images one can easily guess that, even if he didn’t know the fate that lay in wait for him in the near future, Beal wasn’t by temperament an optimist. All of his work, first to last, resonates with a feeling of his destiny.
What one also senses, however, is the power of his image-making. He creates a world, seen in fragments, but with a powerful inner coherence. Like a number of British artists before him, he can be described as literary, in the sense that he often uses the visual art he creates to offer a commentary on existing texts. Yet he never allows these texts to overwhelm his imagination. He inhabits the text fully and makes it a vehicle for his own imagination.
Beal died too early, and it is impossible to know what he might have achieved, had he lived a longer life. What one can say is that he is part of the now long succession of British artists who had something unique to say about the world they lived in and, yes, about the society they inhabited. The do-goody commentators of the present moment are likely to be quickly forgotten. There is not enough in their work to feed the spectator’s imagination.
Bartholomew Beal 24/8/1989 – 26/12/2019
References
Campbell-Johnston, R 2020, ‘Andy Warhol review — enjoyable, but time to consign him to the history books’, The Times, 10 March,
Biography.
Bartholomew Beal (Barley to his friends) graduated with a BA in fine art painting from Wimbledon College of Art in 2012 with a 1st class degree. Jason Colchin-Carter, founder of Isis Phoenix Arts, saw his work for the first time on June 15 2012 at Wimbledon College of Art Graduate Show’s Private View where Beal’s work sold out. Colchin-Carter was able to see at first hand and understand the obvious talent demonstrated in his work. ‘Barley was exceptionally impressive being able to speak very lucidly about his work and ideas, his love of language, literature, and poetry’. As a result, a working relationship of management and representation developed that lasted to 2017. Beal entered and won the Jonathan Vickers Residency at the end of the Olympiad summer—the UK’s biggest financial award residency in excess of £30k for a full year with studio, materials and a small but excellent support team. During the exciting ensuing growth period many exhibitions were held by Isis Phoenix Arts. These included Biscuit. I’ve kept you half (Mall Gallery 2013), Saint Mondays (Vickers residency; Art Gallery, Derby & Derby Museum 2013), collaborations with IP Arts and FAS Bond Street for two solo exhibitions, namely, A heap of broken images (2014) and This great stage of folks (2016). Beal was the youngest artist ever to exhibit at the FAS which at the time was the oldest gallery in the UK, being established for over 175 years. Isis Phoenix Arts found homes for his work in some of the more prominent private collections in the UK, including Mr Levedev’s collection, international collectors, and in corporate collections. Numerous group shows were held, as well as three art fairs ‘Art15’, ‘Art14’, and Art Miami 2015. Beal’s practice involved painting works stimulated by literature, particularly plays and poems, drawing upon themes from T. S. Eliot, William Shakespeare, Seamus Heaney, and Eugène Ionesco.
Beal passed on Boxing Day 2019, aged 30. His legacy is an incredible body of work from 2012 onwards, and an outstanding inspiration to his contemporaries. Isis Phoenix Arts and Jason Colchin-Carter took great pleasure in achieving all this with and for him.
For all enquiries please contact Isis Phoenix Arts onoffice@isisphoenixarts.com
Further links:
http://www.isisphoenixarts.com/project/bartholomew-beal/
http://www.isisphoenixarts.com/exhibitions/
http://www.isisphoenixarts.com/project/bartholomew-beal/
Author
John Edward McKenzie Lucie-Smith (born 27 February 1933), known as Edward Lucie-Smith, is an English writer, poet, art critic, curator and broadcaster.
From the article:
https://www.trebuchet-magazine.com/bartholemew-beal-1989-2019/