Real & Imaginary
Donald Kuspit writes, “With her absurdly long neck, Noah Becker’s female Figure in Profile, 2023 is clearly the secular sister of Parmigianino’s Madonna With The Long Neck, 1535-1540, the post-Renaissance masterpiece that inaugurated mannerism. Becker’s many new portraits of sophisticated ladies, not to say upper class femme fatales —all strangely haughty, remote, their eyes often veiled by sunglasses, their lips lushly, not to say luridly red, temptingly kissable—are mannerist in spirit, not to say subliminally surreal. Mannerism is indeed the ancestor of surrealism, as the art historian Arnold Hauser convincingly argued.”
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Illusory Vistas
In an extensive series of acrylic paintings executed mainly between 2019 and 2021, Noah Becker often utilizes paradigms of twentieth-century art as a means of investigating the psychologically-charged self-portrait within real and imaginary landscape settings. In other paintings of this series, Becker explores themes of the female figure and human psyche depicted within enigmatic spaces. The landscape genre also takes on surreal charges of portraiture. These arresting paintings of Becker address the unconscious and humanity’s creative impulse through modernist and postmodern iconography.
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Noah Becker
Noah Becker is an American and Canadian artist and jazz saxophonist who has been based in New York City for the past twenty years. His paintings have been exhibited at art institutions worldwide, including the Vancouver Art Gallery in Canada. Aside from his visual art production, Becker publishes Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, an art journal featuring writings by art critics, such as Donald Kuspit, Anthony Haden-Guest and Phoebe Hoban. The writings of Becker have also appeared in Art in America, Interview Magazine, Canadian Art, Huffington Post and Artvoices.
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