---

Robert Beckmann

Robert Beckmann has been creating art his entire life. His curiosity and intellect take him many places and his art takes many forms.  

He was awarded a prize for sculpture by The Art Institute of Chicago in 1969. In 1972 he lived for weeks in a Museum in Denver to create an installation with three other artists. Since then most of his art has been two-dimensional and has been exhibited throughout the world from New York to New Haven (Yale), from Finland to Slovenia, Estonia and Russia, from Miami to Scotland, Canada, San Francisco and Japan.

Much of Robert's work can be found in public places.

In Las Vegas, his murals can be found in most hotels and his “big-horned sheep” look down at you above the moving walkway in the D concourse at McCarran International Airport. In Ashland he is responsible for the Shakespeare portrait on the Bard’s Inn.

His last big mural project was installed in 2005 at the U.S. Botanic Garden, near the Senate Chamber on the Capital grounds, in Washington, DC. The six, large-scale (7’ x 12’), murals of the world’s most economically important plants took him 2 years to research and execute. 

Robert has always done studio art as well.  

His 1993 series Body of a House, eight 6’ x 8’ oils, focused on above ground nuclear testing and traveled to 20 different museums in this country. A variant also soloed at The Artists’ Necropolis in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The series was then purchased by The Nevada Museum of Art in Reno. 

Robert's recent paintings explore new materials and procedures while grappling with questions such as: "How does the microcosm mirror the macrocosm? When does a simplification of empirical reality become abstract? How do we find a balance between order and chance and, acknowledging that our consciousness is fragmented (by our pace and media disjunction), how can we become whole again and possibly heal our world?"