PRESENTATION:Hayley Barker
Hayley Barker is a Los Angeles based painter whose nuanced landscape and nature paintings strike a seemingly impossible harmony between intimacy and grandeur. Her subjects are sometimes explicitly rendered from life – the tree from her bedroom window, the view across her lovingly tended yard, or the plants on her windowsill – and yet they seem to come from an interior place, balancing real and imaginary worlds in works that suggest as much a dreamscape as a landscape.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive
Technically, Hayley Barker’s works present a contradiction, seemingly dense, almost claustrophobic, in the way they are worked and yet full of space, color and light. Dryly painted with fine brushes, often on raw linen allowed to show through, they seem intensely personal and yet invitingly universal. Barker’s paintings elaborate spaces that can’t be nailed down and identified. She calls them “spaces of passage,” of transition—across the immeasurable distance from life to death, perhaps, but also within life, from one physical or spiritual state to another. Her works speak of mystery, loss: intimations of what lies beyond the boundaries of the self. They are paintings which explore and express an emotional or mental state, sometimes originating in a specific place or object but always harnessing intuition rather than intellect, discovery rather than design and faith rather than logic. They have an energy that recalls the visionary interiority of nineteenth century symbolists Redon and Moreau but with a sensibility that feels more akin to the work of Bonnard and Vuillard. Featuring the sumptuous palette and fine mark-making characteristic of Hayley Barker’s signature, ethereal landscapes, “New Yard, Elysian Heights” draws from the dreamlike imagery of 19th Century symbolists and the artist’s own garden as inspiration. The etching, Barker’s first print, is also her first depiction of the backyard of her new home in the Elysian Heights neighborhood of Echo Park, Los Angeles. It features a path of stepping stones she placed amid potted plants that ascend to a higher part of the yard. Like the lush gardenscapes Barker has become known for, the print relates to the landscape paintings of artists such as Édouard Vuillard, Charles Burchfield, and Paul Gauguin, but is imbued with her signature treatment of nature, reflecting a sense of femininity, spirituality, and a deep appreciation for the earth. Barker created the new edition during a three-week residency at Wingate Studio, a print workshop in a classic New England barn set on a fifty-five-acre family farm in New Hampshire, where she worked with master printers Peter and James Pettengill. Barker also worked on a series of monoprints featuring the crabapple and cherry blossom bouquet that greeted her when she arrived at the studio. Here, she translates her rich, atmospheric scenery and dry brush painting technique into a unique work.
Photo: Hayley Barker, New Yard, Elysian Heights (detail), 2023, Six-plate etching with aquatint, soft ground, and spit bite on Rives BFK paper, 20 x 16 inches (50.8 x 40.6 cm), Edition of 30, 5 AP, Signed, dated, and numbered rectoM Printed by Wingate Studio, New Hampshire, Published by Utopia Editions© Hayley Barker, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery
Info: www.davidzwirner.com/
