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Bartosz Beda
Born in Poland in 1984, Bartosz Beda relocated to the UK in 2008 to study at the Manchester School of Art. After graduating in 2012 with an MA in Fine Art, Beda was selected for the 2012 Catlin Art Guide as the most promising emerging artist in the UK. Short-listed for the Title Art Prize, the Door Prize, and selected for The Saatchi New Sensations 2012, group exhibition in London for most exciting graduate students in the UK. He won the esteemed Towry Award for the Best of the North of England 2012. Beda was a finalist for the Williams Drawing Prize in Connecticut, the USA in 2014, won second place in the Viewpoints 2014 competition at the Aljira, Center for Contemporary Art in New Jersey, USA, 2014. Recently, Bartosz won first place for Interstate Group Exhibition, CWU Sarah Spurgeon Gallery, Ellensburg, WA, USA, 2017.
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Beda was awarded a six-month scholarship from Manchester Metropolitan University to attend the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden, Germany in 2012/13, and received a fellowship from Fondazione per’l Arte, Rome, Italy in 2016. In 2018, Bartosz Beda was awarded a fellowship residency at Goggle, Center for the Arts in Reading, PA.
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He has participated in group shows including Microarte. El tamano si importa, Galeria Liebre, Madrid, Spain, 2012; Schools of Art. Voll.3, Oktogon der HfBK, Dresden, Germany, 2013; Petty Theft, Launch f18, New York, USA, 2013; ING Eye Exhibition, Mall Galleries, London, UK, 2015 and At the Surface, Foundry Art Center, St. Charles, MO, 2018. Beda had solo exhibitions at Galleria Liebre, Spain (2013), BAC Gallery, Colombia (2015), Jackson-Teed, England (2016), Rosemary Duffy Larson Gallery, USA (2017), Mildred M.Cox Gallery, USA (2018), Brownsville Museum, USA (2019), Hopkins Center for the Arts USA (2019), Execute Project, USA (2019).
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Beda’s works are in public collection at Reading Public Museum, Brownsville Museum, Siena Art Institute, and Fondazione Per’l Arte, as well as in private collections throughout Europe, the United States, South Africa, and Asia.
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Before relocating to England, Beda worked on animation in the film industry, including two movie productions, Ichthis by Marek Skrobecki (2005) and Peter and the Wolf by Suzieh Tempelton (2006), which received the Oscar Prize in 2007.
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Beda’s art has been widely interviewed and referenced for The Independent, Studio International, Expose Art Magazine, Creative Times, Radcliffe Times, A-N Magazine, Mastars at Axisweb, Arteon Art Magazine, Expose Magazine, Spokesman-Review, BuzzFeed, Daily News and featured in The Guardian, The Telegraph and Money Week., NatWest, Inlander. Mentioned on BBC Radio 4 in February 2013 as ‘one to watch’. He now lives and works in the United States.
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Artist Statement:
I want to believe that my paintings reveal on the canvas a kind of intellectualizing of the internal human conflict of reality and hope, and of my conflict as well. I would hope that they draw the viewer into a consideration of fear, love, anguish, and other human emotions in conflict, and because the conflict is ongoing, there can be no successful end to the search for comfort, no matter how much we might hope for it. Ultimately, the futility of the search is an absurdity, or so I think these paintings discover. Who we essentially are in the world is not who we would be. Always the conflict. I feel it when I paint.
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