Whitney Biennial 2017 | Art & Artists

Floor 3

Born 1949 in Brookline, MA
Lives in Berlin, Germany and Falmouth, MA

Groundbreaking avant-garde filmmaker Robert Beavers uses 16mm film to portray the textures and intimacies of everyday life. Beavers’s meticulous compositions serve as luminous representations of beauty and ruminations on mortality. 

In Pitcher of Colored Light and The Suppliant, Beavers renders the domestic spaces of his aging mother and a deceased friend with formal precision and tenderness. Loss and ephemerality similarly permeate Listening to the Space in My Room, a split glimpse at the quotidian lives of an elderly Swiss couple and into the world of the filmmaker at a transitional moment. Looking at love, renewal, and life in pursuit of creativity, the film is a meditation on personal transformation.

Screenings: May 13–14