Persistent Undoing: Edmond Brooks-Beckman

Opening on the 9 October, 4 - 8pm. Coinciding with the 2026 Frieze Week London Gallery Moments: Bloomsbury Afternoon. 

"When does preservation become self destructive?

I break images then join them back. What appears as the finished piece has no resemblance to the process of deconstruction it took to get there. What may look like confidence or certainty has come out of a series of decisions much more related to doubt.

Doubt bleeds into the paintings like the wariness I feel about identity. I have a compulsion to acknowledge it and then move through and pass it. Identity is now a threshold, beyond which the process becomes sculptural, carving away paint to find form.

At what point does image become experience?"

Edmond Brooks-Beckman

Persistent Undoing explores the work of Edmond Brooks-Beckman, whose practice considers how histories, languages, and personal mythologies are carried through material processes. Working through layered abstraction, inscription, and erasure, Brooks-Beckman investigates how meaning persists within marks, symbols, and inherited forms.

Across painting and collage, the exhibition considers how memory and cultural inheritance are not fixed or stable, but continually rewritten, concealed, and rediscovered. Marks may become illegible, symbols may mutate into personal iconographies, and stories may survive not through clarity but through traces. For Brooks-Beckman, the artwork becomes a site where language, ritual, and memory are materially embedded and reactivated.

In Brooks-Beckman’s paintings, words, names, and symbols are inscribed into the surface before being layered over with oil paint. Through a process of scraping, carving, and removal, fragments of these marks re-emerge - ghostly, partial, and often unreadable. What remains is not a legible language but a residue of one: signs that point toward ancestry, belief systems, and inherited identities without fully revealing them. The painting becomes a temporal archive, where acts of concealment and excavation mirror the ways cultural memory is formed and carried.

The relationship between inscription and erasure is central to Brooks-Beckman’s practice. Rather than presenting language and symbolism as fixed systems of communication, his works reveal them as unstable, layered, and continually subject to transformation. Earlier marks remain embedded beneath subsequent gestures, allowing the surface to operate simultaneously as image, archive, and record of its own making.

Brooks-Beckman’s approach suggests that inheritance is not simply preserved but continually interpreted through acts of making, reworking, concealment, and rediscovery. His paintings hold traces of multiple moments at once, creating a tension between what is visible and what remains buried beneath the surface. Meaning emerges not from complete narratives, but through the encounter with fragments and residues.

The exhibition positions tracing as both a material and conceptual process: tracing language through paint, tracing memory through marks, and tracing ancestry through symbols and ritual. In each case, the act of tracing becomes a form of searching - through layers of paint, through histories of belief and cultural inheritance, and through the accumulation of gestures - to locate meaning within what remains.

Persistent Undoing ultimately considers cultural memory as something that survives not in complete or stable narratives, but in fragments: marks, symbols, gestures, and traces that continue to carry meaning even when their origins have become obscured. Brooks-Beckman’s paintings occupy this space between revelation and concealment, inviting us to look closely at what has been erased, what persists, and what can still be recovered from the surface.