Shawn Barber "Tattooed Portraits: Chronicle"

Joshua Liner Gallery

poster for Shawn Barber "Tattooed Portraits: Chronicle"

This event has ended.

Joshua Liner Gallery presents Tattooed Portraits: Chronicle, an exhibition of new paintings by the Los Angeles-based artist Shawn Barber. As a painter documenting contemporary tattoo practices, Barber broadly comments on the act of mark-making itself, on multiple levels, including aspects of the pictorial, the sensual, the practical, and the personal. In these twenty new paintings and eight works on paper, many of them portraits of friends and clients who have sat for Barber, the artist draws on his interest in the conventions of portraiture, the handling of paint, and the specialized mileux of his duel occupations as both a fine artist and a tattoo artist (terms that are perhaps interchangeable here).

If tattoos can be viewed as rites of passage, Barber has embodied these symbols of change in the loose compositions, meandering lines, occasional paint drips, and dynamic subjects of his work. One of the most arresting is the tall portrait of painter Thomas Woodruff, portrayed standing before one of his own dazzling works. Nude and tattooed, Woodruff’s skin is also depicted as alive with images, Barber’s suggestion, perhaps, that all of existence is a canvas for human energy and imagination.

Media

Schedule

from April 24, 2010 to May 22, 2010

Opening Reception on 2010-04-24 from 18:00 to 21:00

Artist(s)

Shawn Barber

  • Facebook

    Reviews

    All content on this site is © their respective owner(s).
    New York Art Beat (2008) - About - Contact - Privacy - Terms of Use