Bill Beckley The Word-Image Riddle and the Aesthetics of Beauty

Bill Beckley (Hamburg, 1946) is an America conceptual artist, and was one of the first artists to use photography as a means of artistic expression. In the early 1970s he was part of a loose-knit group of conceptual artists that used images and fictional texts in a form that came to be known as Narrative Art.
In the 1980s, he experimented with various materials and his work became more sculptural and pictorial. By the end of the decade, he found a way to integrate these materials with photography and this integration became a very important aspect of all his works.

In 2019 he produced the Neapolitan Holidays series, inspired by cards dated between 1915 and 1972, sent to or from Naples. The artist responded to the text on the postcard with an email or a text message: an old postcard receives a response, even after a hundred years.

The book collects a selection of more than 100 works capable of tracing the evolution of Beckley’s work, from the first photography in which he authoritarians as George Washington (1969), to the famous photos of the stems of flowers, up to the series “Neapolitan Holidays” of 2019, accompanied by two suggestive critical readings, signed by David Carrier and Andrea Viliani, and a conversation with the artist.
English edition, Andrea Villani’s essay has been translated by Simon Turner.