Martin Beck

"This artist is not afraid to paint at the top of his lungs. Beck's handling of pigment is professional, but everywhere subordinated to the themes he's painting. Its chalky flatness works almost as if …"

"Beck's complex figure compositions bring baroque spatial dynamics into the back yards of America. His individuals are either unhappily sexualized or awkwardly self aware, or both. They strain under th…"

"Mr. Beck says he once heard a visitor to one of his shows characterize the work as ‘Norman Rockwell gone bad.’ That sums up his territory: Mr. Beck seems determined to take America's pulse at the end …"

"The elegant simplifications of the human form, picked out with Beck's layered color, is reminiscent of the 19th-century Munich school, a style conceived to ennoble the human form and the very atmosphe…"