Beate Wheeler "Abstract Rhythms: 1960s on 10th Street" is on display at Moss Galleries in Falmouth, ME, from Jun 13 2025, through August 9, 2025
Moss Galleries is proud to announce Beate Wheeler’s “Abstract Rhythms: 1960s on 10th Street,” a vibrant retrospective of the expressionistic color painter Beate Wheeler (1932-2017), on view from June 13 to Aug. 9 at the Falmouth gallery.
A painter of melodic, lyrical abstraction, Wheeler’s work from the 1960s through the 1990s radiates with teeming color and emotional vitality. Though long overlooked by the mainstream art market, Wheeler was deeply embedded in the avant-garde circles of her era, sharing creative space with titans of 20th-century American art.
“Beate Wheeler’s work feels like a revelation — vivid, emotionally charged, and visually expansive,” said Elizabeth Moss, owner and director of Moss Galleries. “She represents the best of what Abstract Expressionism could offer: freedom, depth and deeply personal innovation. We’re honored to bring her work into the light where it belongs.”
Born in Berlin, Wheeler fled Nazi Germany with her family in 1938 and went on to study at Syracuse University and the University of California, Berkeley, where she came under the influence of Milton Resnick. In New York, she became a founding member of the influential March Gallery along with Pat Passlof, Elaine de Kooning, and Robert Beauchamp. She was part of the Tenth Street cooperative scene that included Lois Dodd, Lynne Drexler, and Alex Katz. Despite being immersed in this heady world of experimentation and exchange, Wheeler remained committed to a uniquely introspective practice.
The effortless melding of colors in Wheeler’s paintings — evocative of seamless choral harmonies, natural beats, inner melodies of the mind and intuition — earned her praise at the National Arts Club, Downing Street Gallery, and beyond. Nelson Rockefeller collected her work, and ARTnews dubbed her an “artists’ artist.” Wheeler lived for decades at the Westbeth Artists Housing in New York’s West Village with her husband, the writer Spencer Holst.
With paintings that shift from dense fields of deep, saturated color to lighter, more impressionistic strokes in the 1970s, Wheeler’s canvases reveal a deft command of color theory and composition. Her works were spontaneous in spirit, yet crafted with a precision that reflects both formal training and fearless intuition.
For more information, visit www.elizabethmossgalleries.com.
It is not simply a description of a distant land, but an evocation of longing itself, where the imagination fashions a paradise from fragments of memory.
These paintings arise from that same longing. Though grounded in lived experience and plein-air observation, they are not depictions of real islands, but psychological terrains; fragments of remembered coastlines reassembled through the soft distortion of nostalgia and desire. Yet these islands are not easily entered. Undergrowth, rocks, and steep inclines interrupt the viewer’s path, withholding access. Where traditional landscape painting often invited entry through a meandering path or opening, these compositions resist approach. This deliberate inaccessibility echoes the condition of longing itself- a vision of paradise glimpsed but never reached.
These islands become metaphors for distance and return, isolation and hope. Bathed in hard light and stillness, they suggest worlds untouched, yet entirely constructed. In this sense, Under a Swift Sunrise is less about arrival than about the yearning to arrive; to glimpse, if only momentarily, a far green country that exists somewhere between what is remembered and what is imagined.
Moss Galleries is at 100 Fore St., Portland. For more information, call 207-781-2620,
email liz@elizabethmossgalleries.com, or visit www.elizabethmossgalleries.com.
Beate Wheeler, "Abstract Rhythms: 1960s on 10th Street" at Moss Galleries in Portland. (Craig Becker/Photographer)