Martin Beck
Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Conneticut, USA
30 March – 5 October 2025
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, was founded by fashion designer Larry Aldrich in 1964. It is one of the oldest non-collecting institutions in the United States and the only venue in Connecticut dedicated solely to contemporary art. In 2025, the museum has invited Martin Beck to present his first solo museum presentation in the country. Martin Beck: ... for hours, days, or weeks at a time is based on research into environments, and a series of vinyl records from the 1970s with acoustics of nature and meditative tunes. Through a variety of media, the exhibition will explore the methods through which soundscapes are captured, compressed and represented. To this end, Beck goes beyond the audio and also studies the images of sunsets and thunderstorms, which figured on the covers of the records.
Martin Beck (born 1963) studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. He was a visiting artist in the art and design programmes at the California Institute of the Arts and held a professorship at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Geneva, between 2001 and 2005. Since 2004, he has taught at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. His own art often results from in-depth research into architecture, design and popular culture, exploring the relationship between art and social conditions. He works with various media, from writing, drawing and photography to sculpture and video. In recent years he had solo exhibitions at 47 Canal, New York; Kunstverein München and Bergen Kunsthall, among others, and participated in group exhibitions at KM Galerie, Berlin; Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art; mumok, Vienna; Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and Last Tango, Zurich.
This is his second collaboration with Phileas, following his participation at FRONT International, Cleveland, in 2022.
