Announcing representation of Tony Bechara

7 June 2024

Lisson Gallery is pleased to now represent Puerto Rico-born artist Tony Bechara. The announcement follows Bechara's inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery, held in New York earlier this year.

Tony Bechara’s dynamic, color-saturated paintings create a pure field of physical perception. Each canvas is meticulously painted with multicolor areas of quarter-inch squares. Using strips of masking tape, Bechara arranges carefully formulated hues into a playful and invigorating optical surface, made up of a multitude of small colored units. The work’s overall rhythm is determined by a process that is systemic but designed to allow combinations of color to emerge by chance. Bechara cites influences across art history, including the colors of Matisse and Vuillard, the pointillism of Seurat and Signac, traditions of weaving and crafting, the precision of hard-edge abstraction, and the famed Byzantine-era mosaics at Ravenna. These influences are evidenced in Bechara’s approach to painting: he uses a tile-like grid as the basis for his explorations into the principles of color usage, particularly the intersection of organization and randomness. The division of the surface of the painting into small modular boxes is similar to pixels; the gaze is constantly in motion. Bechara presents the viewer with their retinal and neurological relationship to color, balancing one’s immediate impression of hue and the overarching logic of pattern.

Tony Bechara was born in Puerto Rico in 1942 and today lives and works in New York City. A graduate of Georgetown University, Bechara attended Georgetown Law School and New York University before later studying at the Sorbonne in Paris and the New York School of Visual Art, benefiting in particular from the lessons of Richard Serra and Joseph Raphael. In the 1970s and 80s, Bechara was included in exhibitions organized by the Boulder, Colorado based Criss Cross pattern printing collective and featured work in the group exhibition ‘Islamic Allusions’ at the Alternative Museum in New York.