One of the shows we highly recommend this week to check out in NYC is Karen Barbour's exhibition with the great Harkawik gallery.
Born in 1956 in San Francisco, Karen Barbour lives and works in Inverness, CA. Her paintings evidence a dazzling hallucination, a private language pieced together through a relentless spiritual pursuit, and an index of seemingly endless revisions, propositions, and barely-perceptible apparitions that thoroughly attenuate our perceptual faculties. Her work develops slowly over great lengths of time, and she has been focused for the past several years on reworking paintings begun in the 80s and 90s. Here she useses her own paintings as a kind of baseline for further elaboration and investigation, accumulating marks slowly and deliberately, only to cut back into the surface in bold gestures. She composes them via a process that is simultaneously additive and subtractive, and time spent in their presence leads to myriad discoveries, inside the bounds of the canvas, and out.
Barbour earned her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her BA from UC Davis.
