exhibits and represents artists working across a variety of disciplines with particular focus on contemporary book arts, works on paper, collage and assemblage.

910 Santa Fe, #101, Denver, Colorado, USA

at the north end of the 910 Arts Complex

720.282.4052 • alicia@abecedariangallery.com

back to intro

Robbin Ami Silverberg

Terri Tibbatts

Thomas Parker Williams

Tonia Bonnell

Wim de Vos

Doug Beube

Brooklyn, New York

Max Weber Deconstructed

altered book

5 x 7

$2700

The book from which this work is constructed was a volume of paintings by Russian-born Jewish-American artist, Max Weber, an early and preeminent cubist in the United States and, later, a figurative expressionist. Made with a belt sander, this altered edition creates a visual tension between the familiar reproductions (in this case, Celadon Vase and Flowers, 1935) and the abstractions resulting from the carefully hollowed out potholes in the paper surfaces. The viewer’s eyes move frenetically across the tiny embedded ovals as these many “eyes” glare back—both startled and startling. The frayed shapes give the altered pages a tactile quality as well as an unsettling depth, metaphorically mimicking the emotional depth one might feel looking at Weber’s paintings.

Patterns of Abuse

altered book, collage

9½ x 6½ x 11/5 in

$ 1800

This work is formed from two texts. A novel about politics and power by John H. Taylor, Patterns of Abuse, is the actual book whose binding you see and whose cover and pages have been hollowed out in the shape of a bowl. This redaction is not evident, however, as a single altered page of Bob Woodward’s Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, has been slipped in just underneath the gouged-out cover, thus veiling the inner world of Taylor’s book. Of course, the altered Woodward page itself, with most of the print drilled out, resembles a classified document with censored text and alludes to the way in which abuse perpetuates itself, becoming habitual and recurrent.

d-Beube%20Portrait%20of%20a%20Virus%20in%20the%20Hermitage%2002.tif

Portrait of a Virus in the Hermitage

altered book

71/8 x 7 x 5/8

$7000
The death of two friends from AIDS in the early 1990s sadly inspired the theme of decay in this work, a corrosive force which eats away at this volume of exquisite facsimiles from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, destroying its representations of the human body. I manipulated a belt sander, as a drawing implement, to grind away at the images in an oval shape that referenced cameo portraits in both photography and painting. Instead of capturing the likeness of a human physiognomy within the elliptical field, the alteration ends up eradicating the image like a disease feeding on ink and paper. Compounding the metaphor of fatal illness, here also is figured - by disfigurement - a non-computer virus to which the material works of human culture are subject.

Doug Beube is a mixed-media artist working in bookworks, collage, sculpture and photography. Since 1993, he has been curator of a private collection, The Allan Chasanoff Bookworks Collection: The Book Under Pressure, in New York City. Doug teaches classes at Parsons The New School in artists' books, collage, mixed-media, and photography and workshops at Penland, Haystack and The Center for Book Arts. He regularly lectures on his work throughout the US, Canada and Europe. Prior to receiving an MFA in Photography from the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY, graduating in 1983, he was darkroom assistant to Minor White in Arlington, MA. He exhibits extensively both nationally and internationally and his bookworks and photographs are in numerous private and public collections.