AGE: 32
BASED: New York
Hannah Beerman may technically be a young artist, but there’s something in the painter and her work that far surpasses her age. It could be the profound sensitivity and intensity with which she approaches her practice—living and working in the same space, moving between canvases in the early morning’s solitude.
It could also be that Beerman has spent her entire life deeply immersed in art. Her childhood home in Nyack, New York, was also the childhood home of American assemblage legend Joseph Cornell. Beerman’s father is a painter and her maternal grandmother is a printmaker, both of whom worked from that same house. Growing up, Beerman would sneak into their shared studio and make sculptures out of scraps fished from the recycling bin. “I didn’t realize I was making art,” she says. “It was just a way of existing. I didn’t know that being a painter or an artist was separate from being a person.”
Beerman works from the floor of her studio, rotating between canvases and naps. The artist incorporates materials as diverse as a stuffed dog toy or dried flowers to create works that are three-dimensional, but which she describes as neither sculpture nor collage. Though her canvases are comparatively small in scale, there’s a rawness to them—almost as if going any larger would be more than one could bear.
For a time, Beerman wanted to be a writer, and still holds poetry close. There’s certainly something lyrical in her paintings, which could easily disassemble into disparate objects, but cohere instead. After completing undergraduate studies at Bard—where she met and befriended Carolee Schneemann—Beerman moved to the East Village, where she lived in an apartment formerly inhabited by performance artist Karen Finley. While living there, she became friends with poet Eileen Myles. “This is seriously dangerous work ripping open painting to see what it can hold,” Myles wrote after meeting the artist. “Hannah Beerman owns the world.” No argument here.
