Painted Photographs ((some collaged, mostly Dumpsters))

For decades, John Beech, an interdisciplinary artist with an expansive practice, has painted and otherwise intervened on the surface of printed photographs, a process he describes as “interrupting the viewer's gaze into the perceived depth captured by the camera and a conjoining of two worlds: a moment from the past merged with the actual space that the printed photograph occupies.”

Within this larger project exists a deep vein of works that begin with photographs of industrial dumpsters in his adopted hometown of Brooklyn. These utilitarian forms–attractive to Beech for both their grit/patina and their relationship to minimalist sculpture–have been the base for hundreds of photo-paintings, a rich selection of which comprise the core of this volume. This compendium is introduced and contextualized by a newly commissioned essay focusing on the genesis and ongoing evolution of this body of work within a body of work.