Press Release January 2026

A Gentle Man (Part II) (1975-2029)

A Touring Exhibition​​​​

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“Art is not your life. It is somebody else’s.” (Frank O'Hara)

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“Because you have the right to be obscure, first to yourself.” (Edouard Glissant)

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This touring exhibition by Becky Beasley is a pastoral interior landscape with a gallery-sized pale green linoleum floor artwork, including a series of inset hand-cut linoleum lakes silhouettes and a décor that transforms the length of the gallery into an environment. Around the lakes, adjustable ‘conversation’ or ‘kissing’ benches -designed by the artist- provide a place to sit. What a relief it is to sit down! Artist Roni Horn wrote that rivers are for moving along, where lakes are for sitting beside.

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Beasley’s small ceramic works sit discreetly on a series of ‘lakes’ tables which mirror the floor designs. Pastel pink linen curtains swirl slowly in circles on rails formed in the shapes of the letters, H, S and P., an acronym for Highly Sensitive Person. Elongated oak picture-shelves, on which groups of existing and new photographic works lean, frame the lengths of the gallery.

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The exhibition includes a four-part video portrait of an imaginary figure – a merging of the intersecting lives American novelist and shorty-story writer, Bernard Malamud, and the artist’s father. The work explores milestone leaps of faith in life through its four discreet chapters: work, family, chosen family and dying.

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So, what is a figure? What is it to figure something? To figure something out? To wonder, do I figure at all? And, if, so, how do I figure and who decides ?

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“Here’s the person I want.

Hello person! Doesn’t hear me.”

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This touring exhibition has been commissioned by QUAD, Bluecoat and John Hansard Gallery with funding from the Freelands Foundation and Arts Council England.