David Beck was a contemporary American artist known for his ingenious combination of woodworking, painting, and miniaturist sculpture techniques. His inventive works reference curiosity cabinets, reliquaries, Joseph Cornell’s boxes, American folk and outsider art, comic book humor, 19th-century mechanical toys, and natural history dioramas.
As a practitioner of the utmost precision, a master of simple mechanics, and a gifted artist, Beck made objects of wonder that were never quite what they seemed. Whether it be through a secret compartment, a window, a lever, or a knob, his creations delivered whole worlds imbued with sweetness, desire, irony, nostalgia, and loss…but also, and perhaps more importantly, delight. Born in 1953 in Muncie, Indiana, he received his BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in 1976. That same year, he moved to New York where he began exhibiting his work regularly at the Allan Stone Gallery. In 2009 he moved to San Francisco, where he exhibited at Hackett Mill. His work has been shown at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, MoMA PS1, and others. His work is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Bergman Collection in Chicago, IL.