He currently works in a two and three-dimensional format, which is manifested through paintings, sculptures, collages, digital prints, and more recently, large-scale installations. Brooklyn, NY
Lives and works in New York, NY
BA – Fine Arts, Bennington College, 1969
Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, 1978
Arthur Becker is a mixed-media artist currently working in New York City. Inspired by a range of influences and artists from Robert Rauschenberg and ancient ceramics to John Chamberlain and Damien Hirst, Becker’s current body of work focuses on society’s tenuous relationship with the material world. Becker began his formal exploration into the arts upon entering Bennington College in 1969, where he studied fine arts and served as his class photographer. Becker, who became captivated by the art of antiquity, also assumed a love and mastery of ceramics, eventually graduating with a double major in both ceramics and photography. Upon receiving his bachelor of fine arts, Becker spent time travelling throughout New England, disassembling abandoned 18th century homes and reassembling the materials into new houses—his own home was sold to former Vermont Governor Thomas Salmon. This experience in the de/reconstruction of homes and the re-imagining of the materials would ultimately drive Becker to apply similar techniques, explorations and thought processes to his own art. After a year respite in a monastery in Hawaii – he attended the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and subsequently served as the CEO for two different technology companies – Becker resumed his practice of photography in the late 1990’s, making polaroid collages, crushed and wrinkled to create texture, thus bringing a visual effect common to Impressionistic paintings to the digital space. He used familiar images, from portraits of close friends to favorite weekend getaways, to engage the viewer’s eye and to challenge the quotidian ways we see and view the world around us. Becker’s most recent body of work, including ‘Moneyflies,’ ‘Bad Ideas,’ ‘Money Crush’ and ‘Escape,’ focuses on currency and other material possessions in an exploration of his personal connection to its accumulation, as well as the broader meaning that people assign to it. Additionally, Becker’s work also explores society’s, as well as his own complex relationship with popular iconography and branding (ie: Tiffany Blue and American flags) in an attempt to further understand and deconstruct these connections. Becker is a world traveler and his experiences have intimated that these corporeal-material relationships are not specific to any one country, but rather, are universal. In an attempt to understand this universal idolatry of the material, Becker has created a series of works that focus on both the past and present and bring to light the emotions we often keep to ourselves.
