Sara Barker

Structures that exist at the border between painting and sculpture, Barker’s linear artworks call attention to the physicality of vacant spaces. Like hovering, three-dimensional sketches, Barker’s aluminum, steel, brass, and wood frames present the materiality of her chosen media in a new light. Given closer inspection, her spare, skeletal pieces coated with canvas, gouache, oil, and watercolor, reveal themselves as collage-like and painterly, appearing to almost vibrate. Barker’s representations of space draw on the modernist styles of Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse, and the artist also looks to Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois, influenced by their ability to imbue physical objects with loose, gestural qualities. The writings of Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson, too, have influenced Barker’s overwhelmingly romantic works of simple visuals imbued with deep meaning.