DIMENSIONS 22" x 16.75" MEDIUM Gouache and archival pigment print on paper
Hand-embellished series of 25, 2021
Signed and numbered by the artist on front
Forbes says Hayley Barker's paintings "embody a feminine, Earth-based spirituality" and Artforum agrees, referring to the paintings in her December 2020 solo exhibition at SHRINE (New York) as demonstrating a "visionary grandeur" that combines "a strict parsimony of materials and pictorial extravagance" to "an astonishing degree." Barker's main subject is the natural world, which she renders expressively in oil on linen. The intuitive undercurrent in her approach Anchorenlivens the real and imagined scenes she paints, allowing viewers to pierce directly through to the space between things. The image featured in Barker's hand-embellished series My Riverwood, based on her painting of the same name, was inspired by a swimming hole in Mehama, Oregon, which holds long standing personal significance for the artist, exacerbated by Pacific Northwest forest fires that ran rampant during summer 2020. In My Riverwood, is the world flipped upside down or is it reflecting itself? Barker's style collapses boundaries, illustrating how the ineffable hides its responses in the transition moments between the moon and the mountains, the rivers and the trees.
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