Patricia Sweetow Gallery is thrilled to present Sharon Barnes: Improvisations of a Polyrhythmic Being.
With roots in the music industry as a songwriter, Sharon Barnes lyrical, non-objective paintings hold in their making and materials social and political stories of ancestral remembrance and fierce self-determination.
Barnes understands the seminal power abstraction delivers. Her visual and poetic expression emerged from her decades-long evolution in thinking and working within interiority, the liminal space that is abstract thinking. The ‘figure’ of the painting is Barnes’ implied embodiment of Black history and culture within an abstract form. She expresses this conceptual accommodation so deftly: I’m using the open-ended languages of abstraction alongside the poetic resonance of process and materials so I can point to, without literally depicting, the layered complexities surrounding identity, culture, and Black lived experience. I frequently infuse my works with culturally reverberant materials. Black-eyed peas, sweet tea, quotidian items, and other such materials, as they find their way into the physical and conceptual layers of my work.
Reception:
Saturday, September 14, 4-7pm
Artists in Conversation with Shana Nys Dambrot
Saturday, October 5, at 1:00 pm
Limited seating will be available.
Hours:
Tuesday – Saturday
11am – 6pm