Bruce Beasley

Bruce Beasley
Breakout II, 1992

Bronze
145 x 229 x 61 cm
Edition of 9

Photo credit: Nick Turpin
Courtesy of the artist and Pangolin London

As a teenager, taking cars apart, rebuilding then racing them, Bruce Beasley dreamed of being a racing driver; his middle class family, however, had other ideas and enrolled him on a rocket engineering course: “People thought that was the professional extrapolation of hot rodding.”  He quickly transferred to a sculpture major where his knowledge of cars proved highly useful. Having been using them since he was 16, he brought the first electric welders to Berkeley’s art school; he then built a crane so that the department could have its own foundry: “I’d built things like that to pull motor blocks out of cars”, he says.  To this day, he continues to develop solutions to sculptural challenges: most recently devising a process for using a large-scale 3D printer to replace an expensive stage of bronze casting.
  Beasley creates his work through exploration: allowing the shapes to build and grow and then removing pieces until there is "a sense of absolute correctness”.  'Breakout II' is currently installed outside the Robert Hiscox Building in the City of London until May 2016.
 
Hedge, issue 37, September 2015, pp42-48