FIAC

Becky Beasley (b. 1975, UK) graduated from Goldsmiths College, London in 1999 and from The Royal College of Art in 2002, is an artist who lives and works in Hastings, England.
Beasley’s “sculptures and photographs, as mute and minimal as they appear, unexpectedly open onto literary worlds.”(Christy Lange, Frieze Focus).
Beasley produces objects, photographs and texts which are typically informed by a deep engagement with literature — specifically in the past ten years certain writings of William Faulkner, Herman Melville, Bernard Malamud and Thomas Bernhard— and historical research.
She is interested in the ethics of dialogue and how to inhabit the spaces, works and lives of others in tandem with ones own through art.
Her practice is also concerned with spatial experience, in particularly the interior. She has developed a practice which explores the image and the limits of language. Through an abstracted grammar of the everyday, she sources personal experiences and literary references for moments of complexity and ambiguity.
Beasley’s work has been featured in solo exhibition internationally including, Tate Britain, Serpentine Gallery Pavilion (live work), Spike Island, Leeds City Art Gallery, Towner Art Gallery, 80WSE (Steinhardt, NYU) New York, South London Gallery (live work) and SKUC Gallery, Ljubljana. Group exhibition participation includes Bluecoat, Liverpool; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Kunstverein Munich and La Carte D’Après Nature, National Museums Monaco (Touring to Matthew Marks, New York), as well as three Arts Council Collection touring exhibitions, In a dream you saw a way to survive and you were full of joy, curated by Elizabeth Price; British Art Show 7: In The Days of the Comet and Structure and Material (with Claire Barclay and Karla Black).
Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Artforum, Art Monthly, Frieze, Art Review and Flash Art International. Beasley was on the ICA Artist’s Advisory Committee in 2012 and was nominated for the Max Mara Prize in 2009. She has had five Paul Hamlyn Nominations.

Matthias Bitzer was born in 1975 in Stuttgart, he lives and works in Berlin (D).
He graduated from Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe, Germany in 2004.
His artistic practice combines drawing, sculpture and painting creating experience spaces with strong references to history and intellectuals and a deep reflection on their identity, in which the viewer can immerse himself. The development of his work shows itself in the increasing complexity of the installations, maintaining their focus on the construction of memory and the reconstruction of reality. His research involves literary personalities, writers and their characters who have frequently slipped into outsider positions. Fascinated by the relation between the invisible and the real, Bitzer layers symbolic fragments and fractured forms on top of one another as citations. In a new inspection of classical modern art from today’s perspective, the artist combines portraits and geometric constructions in his drawings, paintings and sculptures. Through the analysis of this multiplicity of figures, Matthias Bitzer’s work investigates different looks on reality and through his more and more complex abstract patterns he gives the viewer a visual translation to this fragmentary dimension, to these different points of view, to possible gazes. Through paintings, sculptures and mural drawings, all strictly connected to each other, he thinks the exhibition space as an autonomous body, where you can “consider the works as a kind of symbolist translation or a decoding of reality that tries to make visible something that was invisible before” as the artist says.
His works are part of Public collections at LACMA, Los Angeles, USA, MARTa Herford, Herford, Germany, Städtische Galerie Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Germany, Geraer Sammlung, Gera, Germany, CCA Andratx, Mallorca, Spain, and Rosenblum Collection & Friends, Paris, France.

Armin Boehm was born 1972 in Aachen. He lives and works in Berlin (D).
Armin Boehm paints fictitious and spatially impossible scenes, based on urban layouts and architectural constructions, that are meant to evoke the inner human condition.
In an interview by Gaston La-Gaffe on FAD Magazine, the artist said “The painted surface is as vulnerable as our skin and looking at it is reaching our emotional system very directly”. Due to his tough personal path he is attracted by the painted surface, which is able to deal with the unconsciousness and emotions of the human being.
The images, which sometimes appear to be aerial views or perpetually receding landscapes, explore the idea of natural and manmade borders in geographic surfaces.
His most famous works are large-scale paintings, constructed using complex combinations of materials including fabric, oil paint, pure pigment, metal, and sand.
A majority of Boehm’s paintings have dark palettes and depict nocturnal views with small sources of light; in preparation for exhibiting his paintings, Boehm has been known to paint the walls gray and dim the lights to deepen the experience of darkness. Other subjects have included interiors, smashed trees, bucolic scenes, and car wrecks.
He received a series of Awards in 1998, Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (D) and in 2001, Cité des Arts, Paris (F).

Mandla Reuter was born in 1975, Nqutu (South Africa), and he lives and works in Berlin (Germany). As a sculptor and installation artist, he explores the ambiguous relationship between art and the notion of ‘place’. The constant focus of Mandla Reuter’s research is the exploration of internal and external space. His interventions, which are subtle but at times also radical, call into question typical artistic notions such as ‘art production’ and ‘presentation context’. Reuter often bases his work on the specific characteristics of the space in which he is exhibiting. Poetic, ironic and surreal, Mandla Reuter is an artist who disrupts the language of the ‘system’ of art. He sometimes appears to entirely detach this from the real world, evoking an alienating atmosphere in which fiction proliferates. Reuter takes local narratives to return them to the world as universal events, metaphors of the contradictions that have always distinguished contemporary man. Iquitos, Buenos Aires, the island of Thasos, Los Angeles – where the artist owns a plot of land purchased for an exhibition (A Plot, De Vleeshal, Middelburg, 2010) – are some of the places that the artist has traced in his personal geography, the routes that led him to come across mythical tales or paradoxical stories.

A selection of his Solo Exhibitions: Neompalta, Friends of S.M.A.K, Ghent, 2018; Papananamama, Galerie Mezzanin, Geneva, 2018; Wasser, Schindler House, MAK Center, Los Angeles, 2017, Leland Fitzpatrick House, Los Angeles, 2017; Francesca Minini, Milano, 2017; Croy Nielsen, Vienna, 2017; Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt, 2017; Mandla Reuter, Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt, 2016; Atlantis in collaboration with Neue Alte Brücke, On Site – Petit Palais, Paris, 2016; #08 Mandla Reuter, Mezzaterra11, Flat Gallery, Belluno.