Trigger Warning
Opening Reception: Friday, February 10, 6:00 – 8:30 pm On view: February 10 – March 11, 2017 Anya Tish Gallery is excited to announce Adormecido, a solo exhibition of new work by Johan Barrios, a Colombian artist now living and working in Houston. Adormecido, featuring paintings and drawings, is Barrios’ inaugural solo exhibition with Anya Tish Gallery. One of the most technically accomplished painters of his generation, Johan Barrios, born in 1982, creates psychological portraits full of contradictions, doubt, beauty and anxiety, with subjects that exist between the surface of the canvas and trompe l’oeil illusion. With surreal and cinematic qualities, the rich graphite drawings and oil paintings read as photographs from a distance, sharing the same metallic, oxidized atmosphere of tintypes. They are as suggestive as they are ambiguous, alluding to narratives that never fully form, and presenting obscured figures in scenes without any definable sense of time and space, candidly capturing reality yet leaving it slightly ajar. Barrios pays close attention to every detail, expertly rendering muscle tone, hands, fabric wrinkles and flyaway hairs. He effortlessly translates light and shadow, executing his pieces with the proficiency of old masters while articulating the ephemerality of human relationships, emotions, and life. Depicted in a state of suspended tension, the subjects, holding out hands, balancing on chairs, and resting their weight on one another, have no identity, no narrative, no location, yet carry a diffused emotional resonance that addresses existential issues such as loneliness, self-discovery, intimacy and fragility. Johan Barrios received his Masters in Fine Arts from the Universidad de Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia, and has since exhibited his work across the globe in such major cities as Zürich, Switzerland; New York City, New York; Barcelona, Spain; Montreal, Canada; Los Angeles, California; and Copenhagen, Denmark. His work has been featured in many renowned print and online publications, including HI FRUCTOSE, The Jealous Curator, and Juxtapose Magazine.
Date
February 11, 2017
Location
Barbara Davis Gallery
4411 Montrose
Houston, Texas, United States
77006
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