Hales is delighted to announce Another place: paintings from the 90s, Basil Beattie RA's fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. A key figure in the development of post-war British abstraction, Beattie (b. 1935, West Hartlepool, UK) is known for his gestural, painterly compositions. Over a career spanning more than sixty years, he has carved out a rigorously process-based practice deeply concerned with the experiential and psychological qualities of painting.

The exhibition takes its title from the monumental painting Another place, which anchors the show alongside a body of smaller-scale works. Together, they showcase Beattie's distinctive visual language and mark a pivotal decade of artistic development. From the late 1980s onwards, Beattie began to move away from pure abstraction, introducing simple motifs that became a resource of infinite possibility. He recognised that abstraction and mark-making could more fully express subjective experience when formal elements took on some of the characteristics of recognisable objects.1

Often architectural in suggestion, Beattie's motifs imply doors, ladders, towers, and corridors-spaces that invite or resist entry, sometimes dissolving into more elusive shapes. Combined with the physical handling of paint, these pictograms communicate aspects of the artist's inner life and psychological state.

Another place has an imposing physical presence, featuring two columns of thickly painted arcs and a door-like opening that emanates light from within a dark field. Rectangular tunnels and thresholds recur throughout the exhibition, echoed across the smaller works, which maintain the same muscularity and material density. The thickness of the paint is of central importance: Beattie has described his most successful works as possessing a kind of potency, hovering in space with a molten quality, as if the paint has reached its melting point.

During the 1990s, Beattie developed his major Witness series, in which earlier grid-based compositions were distorted into freestanding forms. The central ziggurat motif-constructed from compartmentalised sections-holds deep personal significance. Works such as Witness and Tower combine layered gestural marks with distinct architectural blocks rising to a point, recalling the ancient towers of Babylon.

The 1990s were a defining era of critical and formal development for Beattie. His triumphant use of the pictogram communicates not only an image drawn from the real world, but a profound and embodied experience.

Paintings from this period are in the collections of Tate, London; Birmingham City Museum and Gallery, Swindon Museum and Art Gallery; MIMA; and Arts Council England.

Notes

1 Moorhouse, P. Basil Beattie, Taking steps, large works 1986-2009, 2011, ArtNews Contemporary Art, p58.