Martin Beck is an artist whose exhibitions and projects engage questions of historicity and authorship and they draw from the fields of architecture, design, and popular culture. A ‘leitmotif’ in Beck’s practice is the notion of display: his works often engage histories of exhibiting and communication formats and, on a material level, negotiate display’s function as a condition of image-making.

His main bodies of works from the 2000s investigated how the modern conception of display developed in the mid-20th century. For his solo exhibition an Exhibit viewed played populated at Grazer Kunstverein, Beck presented works that emerged out of his research on Richard Hamilton’s 1957 an Exhibit in which colored acrylic panels, suspended from the gallery ceiling, created an environment that turned the gallery space itself into an artwork.