LOU BEACH
BROWSE ARTISTSB. 1947
German
Lou Beach was born in Göttingen, Germany, in 1947, the son of Polish parents displaced by the Second World War. The family immigrated to Rochester, NY, in 1951, where Beach attended public schools and junior college. He traveled to California in 1968 and began his artistic career by making assemblage art and collages cut from old Life magazines. Beach eventually became an illustrator for magazines, newspapers, and record companies. He stepped away from displaying his collages publicly at this time, but with the encouragement of his children, who are also artists, Beach began to exhibit his work in 2009, nearly selling all pieces in his first exhibition, successfully reestablishing him as a fine artist.
His piece, Racehorse, was originally an editorial collage for New West Magazine, which had a short life in the mid-1970s, and was later re-published in California Magazine in 1987. Beach used a found image of a racehorse, edited out the sky, and added a piece of sky paper he purchased from a model train store. He further edited out the horse and rider, overlaying with an image of a $1 bill. The Riemer’s purchased a print reproduction of the collage in 2007. Davis Riemer remarks he was interested in the piece “because it featured an underlying motivation of horse racing – money, and I thought it was a clever illustration. It is not traditional “fine art,” but it is clever, and one of the features of our collection is to provoke questions – satire certainly helps.” One may conjure up darker questions about the business of horseracing, ethics, and the highs and lows rooted in gambling.
Beach lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, and is represented by Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica, CA, Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco, CA, and Frederick Holmes and Company in Seattle, WA.
