37 paintings · 1972–2021 · Private presentation
The Beas Collection —
a complete body of work,
withheld for fifty years.
The Premise
Fifty years, on his own terms.
Gerald “Beas” Beasley is a formally trained American painter who made a decision almost no artist makes: he kept his work. From 1972 to 2021 he painted two complete series — and sold nothing, exhibited nothing, and answered to no market.
This was control, not exclusion. Like Hilma af Klint’s sealed archive or Vivian Maier’s undeveloped negatives, the work waited. With one difference that changes everything: the artist is alive, lucid, and able to tell you why.
Series I · 1972–1979
Big Bang — thirteen paintings.
The first series states the theme: origins. Poured chemistry becomes nebulae and planetary surfaces; pendulum traces become orbits and expansion. Painted in the same decade cosmology itself was becoming precise science, by a painter running experiments of his own.
Series II · 2017–2021
Theory of Everything — twenty-four paintings.
The late series is a notation system: physics rendered as pure sign. Entangled systems mirror one another across a canvas. Waves carry particles. Trajectories are plotted, forces named. The reduction is not simplification — it is an artist compressing fifty years of looking into the fewest possible marks.
Some of these paintings say more than they first appear to. We leave the discoveries to the viewer.
Stewardship
Selecting a steward.
We are privately introducing the collection to a small number of people before any public debut. We are not conducting an auction; we are selecting a steward — a collector or institution for whom a complete, verified, never-exhibited body of work is the point.