Martin Beck
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut, USA
30 March – 5 October 2025
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is one of the oldest contemporary art museums in the United States and was founded by art collector and fashion designer Larry Aldrich in 1964. The Museum is one of the few independent, non-collecting institutions in the country and the only museum in Connecticut solely dedicated to the presentation of contemporary art.
Martin Beck’s first solo museum exhibition in the US following the presentation of his Last Night installation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is informed by his research into the environments record series from the 1970s, exploring their pioneering role as atmospheric tools for self-optimization within a capitalist society. The works in his exhibition … for hours, days, or weeks at a time explore the methods and means through which environments are captured, compressed, and represented. Using drawing, sound, video, and installation, Beck’s works dissect the series’ visual and verbal rhetorics and cut into the claims made for creating spaces of heightened productivity in which one supposedly feels at ease and is ever more functional.
Martin Beck (born 1963) is an artist living in New York and Vienna, Austria. His artworks have been presented widely in Europe and the United States. Recent solo exhibitions include Last Night, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2024), echo* (with Sung Tieu) Salzburger Kunstverein, Austria (2024). His work was also included in the Glasgow International (2024), Front International, Cleveland (2022), exhibitions at the Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale on Hudson, NY (2016 and 2017), the 10th Shanghai Biennale (2014), and the 29th São Paulo Bienal (with Julie Ault) (2010). Beck’s publications include for hours, days, and weeks at a time…(2025), Last Night (2013 and 2019), An Organized Systems of Instructions (2017); rumors and murmurs(2017); The Aspen Complex (2012); and About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe (2007). His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Schaulager, Basel; MUMOK, Vienna; Hessel Museum of Art among others. Together with Julie Ault and Scott Cameron Weaver, Beck curated Down the Rabbit Hole: JB in JT (O-Townhouse, 2020); he was a co-curator for the exhibition and publication project Macho Man: Tell It To My Heart (Kunstmuseum Basel, Culturgest Lisbon, and Artists Space, New York, all 2013; publications 2013 and 2015).
This is his second collaboration with Phileas, following his participation at FRONT International, Cleveland, in 2022.
