Matters Of Fact

Richard Kalina | Art in America | 25th September 2020

Bechtle was one of several important realist painters to come out of 1960’s San Francisco. A meticulous photo realist, he always worked from photos. While careful to borrow photography’s “veracity”, he still played painterly tricks with perceptions of scale and depth. “Bechtle grapples with serious issues of representation, but he does so in such a laboriously off-hand way that it takes a while for a viewer to realize what the artist is up to, and just how good he is.”