Izzy Barber paints in public, on-site, at sunset, last light, and night. This exhibition introduces Los Angeles to Barber’s paintings of scenes across the boroughs of New York City. Barber’s highly impressionistic and often three-dimensional brushstrokes charge her observations of the city’s streets and crowds with the sense of proximity through which they were made.
Walking through the city, down industrial streets, pausing under scaffolds and on bridges, these works soak in the energetic framework of a city. This glimmering slowness is interspersed with throngs of people dancing and gatherings in parks—depictions of pure movement that contain the same energy that is woven into the city at-large by its people, even when absent from view. Barber paints always from this present moment—it is her ultimate subject and driving force: the value and power of attention. To be in the world and to pay deep attention to it, can be a means to privately celebrate communal life.
For Barber, painting after dark invites abstraction. What is known during the day must be abandoned to a new kind of searching that prioritizes intuition over preconception. Beyond the relatively brief duration of their coming into being, many qualities of time thus exist in and around Barber’s paintings. The artist’s studio is a prefatory space only. There, Barber readies the small-scale canvases and panels that will be transported to places in public, to be set up with her portable system of paints and easel. Then, as life continues its flow around this temporary anchor-point, Barber gets to work observing it.
Through this ritual approach, Barber has formulated a set of constraints that are equally temporal and material, informing the physical scale of her works as much as the slowness or speed of their making. The painting’s ground becomes a portal—digging out the vibrant reds and blues that characterize her twilight works; dotting flashes of light and pulling the flurry of people and nature; sometimes etching the outlines into wet paint using the other end of her brush. Although a solo endeavor, loneliness—a theme night scenes might easily step into—doesn’t exist in Barber’s paintings. Hers is a process of sheer exposure to the world; a practice of absolute receptivity.
Izzy Barber (b. 1990) is from Gowanus, Brooklyn and lives and works in Queens, New York. She received her MFA from the New York Studio School in 2017 and BA in Studio Arts and Human Rights from Bard College in 2011. There Is No Time follows solo exhibitions Waiting Game (2023) at Studio d'Arte Raffaelli, Trento, Italy and Crude Futures (2022) and Maspeth Moon (2021) at James Fuentes, New York. Barber’s work has been exhibited at James Fuentes, New York; Galleria Franco Noero, Turin, Italy; David Zwirner Platform; New Orleans Art Center; and in the 2012 Brucennial, among others. Publications include Waiting Game (2023) and JFP03: Izzy Barber (2021).
