Chuck Beamish and Stefan Berg: Meet Me By The Fallen Down tree

United Contemporary is proud to present Meet Me By The Fallen Down Tree, a two-person exhibition of paintings by Chuck Beamish and Stefan Berg.

As the title suggests, this exhibition is an invitation for viewers to convene with the artists amongst the landscapes that they depict, en plein air. In this case, the raw beauty of Algonquin, Northern Ontario, and majestic peaks of the Rockies seen in the paintings of Chuck Beamish, and the broad horizons, big skies, and agricultural fields of Bruce County painted by Stefan Berg.

The inclusion of small studies completed outdoors alongside larger paintings later created in the studio, encourages a conversation between both artists’ processes of observation, capture, and translation. Both Beamish and Berg “observe in order to invent”, and it is impossible to extricate their practices from the direct experiences they seek within the environment, and their mutual admiration for the natural landscape.

Both artists note that there is something endearingly absurd in this shared commitment to outdoor practice, a stubbornness in the face of practicality to arrive on-site day after day with equipment in tow, especially as seasons turn. However, there is no shorthand for this process, and the impossibility of pinning down reality - the fleetingness of evanescent light and rapidly changeable weather conditions - and thrill of attempting to do so, creates a space between observation and invention that so fascinates both artists, and drives their practices forward.

This is Beamish and Berg’s second duo exhibition with United Contemporary. They are peers and painters, friends as well as fellow artists. Their work is grounded in a critical camaraderie as well as a shared approach. The two met while at OCAD, at a time when they were both creating abstractions. Underpinning both of their representational practices, still, is a considered geometric or “abstract” foundation, a structural quality that is emphasised further when working on larger canvases back in the shelter of the studio. This combination of harnessing an unfixed and atmospheric feeling through a constructed internal logic brings us back to the title for this exhibition, itself directional, instructive but not without a certain sense of poetry.