Martin Beck: ... for hours, days, or weeks at a time

March 30, 2025 to October 5, 2025 | Project Space, Klein Kenealy Gallery, Ramp, Leir Gallery

Martin Beck: ... for hours, days, or weeks at a time explores the methods and means through which environments are captured, compressed, and represented. Using drawing, sound, video, and installation, the exhibition presents a suite of works informed by Beck’s research into environments, a series of eleven vinyl records from the 1970s produced by the Syntonic Research Inc. label that registered the acoustics of nature and meditative sounds with high-fidelity recording technology. Marketed as psychoacoustic experiences with the potential to alter domestic and workspace atmospheres—for listeners to transcend the monotony of bureaucratic space and activity—the records laid the groundwork for an emerging industry catering to the care, efficiency, and control of the self. Beck’s interest in these records is their pioneering role as atmospheric tools for self-optimization within an ever more competitive capitalist setting. Dissecting the series promotional material, Beck highlights and cuts into the claims made for creating spaces of heightened productivity in which one supposedly feels at ease and is ever more functional.

Sculptural and installation-type interventions span the entirety of the Museum’s first floor galleries. His large-scale pencil drawings layer the vocabulary of self-care and self-control onto meticulously rendered immersive fern patches, a suite of wall works fragment images of sunsets and thunderstorms that adorn the records’ covers. Beck’s video, in place (environments), trace the atmospheric shifts made possible by sonic overlays and point to the paradoxes that institutional and private spaces—from spas to galleries to prisons—might have in common.

This exhibition is curated by Eduardo Andres Alfonso, Associate Curator. It will be accompanied by a catalogue, co-published by Gregory R. Miller & Co., which will include images of the works on view and an essay by the curator.

Graphite drawing of ferns with typography next to mat-framed Environments vinyl record in the Museum gallery.

Mat-framed Environments vinyl records in the Museum gallery.

Mirrored stainless steel rectangular flat floor sculpture in front of a window in the Museum gallery.

Framed photographs and other collected imagery in the format of a calendar framed on the wall next to a tall site-specific nude curtain.

Archival Branding Materials from Syntonic Research displayed on custom black shelving that is hung on an orange wall.

Projected video on a black wall of a three pane window with a lush forest in the background.

Artist Bio

Martin Beck (b. 1963, Bludenz, Austria) is an artist based in New York and Vienna. His work transposes rigorous research on architecture, design, music, and popular culture into installation, video, photography, writing, sculpture, and drawing. ... for hours, days, or weeks at a time is Beck’s largest solo museum exhibition in the United States, following the presentation of his sound-and-video work Last Night at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in June 2024.

Audio

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum · Martin Beck: ... for hours, days, or weeks at a time

Hear artist Martin Beck talk about his work ... for hours, days, or weeks at a time.

Press Release

Press

“Before rainy-day ambiance YouTube videos, there was Syntonic Research Inc. In the 1970s, the American label sold vinyl recordings of the natural world, intended to increase listeners’ efficiency at work and at home. Artist Martin Beck uses a range of mediums to explore this sonic series, considering how end goals of productivity — and even domination — are often couched in the language of self-care and comfort.”
—Hyperallergic

“That work, like many others by Beck, questions how much information is really communicated by looking at an object, whose context always communicates more than is always obvious. And that’s why it’s all the more necessary to see much of his past works in context of one another at this exhibition, a survey of sorts that includes drawings, a video, and more.”
—ARTnews

“This is the Austrian artist Martin Beck’s largest solo museum exhibition in the United States. The work presented here, in forms including drawing, video, sound and installation, was informed by Beck’s research into “Environments,” a series of vinyl records released in the 1970s that featured natural and meditative sounds, like waves and thunderstorms. Through his artwork, Beck examines how environments are captured and represented, along with themes of self-care and self-optimization.”
—The New York Times

“"Whatever the medium, Beck frames the prosaic record of time's passage such that it feels both newly perceptible and strangely familiar."”
—ArtReview

Funders

Generous support for Martin Beck: ... for hours, days, or weeks at a time is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Significant support is provided by Ellen and Andrew Celli. Additional support is provided by an anonymous donor. This exhibition was produced in collaboration with Phileas - The Austrian Office for Contemporary Art. The catalogue is supported by the Federal Ministry Republic of Austria Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport and the Eric Diefenbach and James Keith Brown Publications Fund. Production support is provided by the Diana Bowes and Jim Torrey Commissions Fund.

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