Background
Robert Barry was born on March 9, 1936, in New York, United States.
Barry studied Fine Art as an undergraduate at Hunter’s College of the City University of New York, graduating in 1963. He earned his Master of Arts from the same school.
Robert Barry was born on March 9, 1936, in New York, United States.
Barry studied Fine Art as an undergraduate at Hunter’s College of the City University of New York, graduating in 1963. He earned his Master of Arts from the same school.
Since 1967, Barry has produced non-material works of art, installations, and performance art using a variety of otherwise invisible media. In 1974, Barry moved to Teaneck. He gave up painting, and began making art using invisible media, including electromagnetic energy, ultrasonic radiation, and inert gases. He describes his art as affecting other things as much as it is affected by those things. He also began incorporating text into his artworks, aiming to make the viewer a part of his pieces.
In the 70's Barrys begins to work with the medium of the language: he publishes several book projects and works with dia installations, in which he shows language fragments on the wall, whose succession is interrupted by the use of empty slides. Barry starts with his "word work", in which he defines and arranges the area by written words. Whether on canvas, on walls, on the floor, on glass areas of buildings or on Mirrors. These isolated words suddenly contact the viewer, whose mental reaction completes the work.
Barry has proven himself to be a prolific artist. He has shown his work in numerous art exhibitions since his first solo exhibition at the Westerly Gallery in New York, in 1964. Barry encourages free association of meaning to his work. In 2007, an installation entitled “Art and War” included large words such as DOUBT, WITHOUT, and DESPERATE placed at random angles on the walls of a residential space. The title of the piece references Sun Tzu's famous Taoist text, "The Art of War", the chosen words a reflection on language, time, and human nature.
In 2011 alone, he was part of 15 group exhibitions and four solo exhibitions, most of which were in Europe. However, his works have also been shown in the United States, at The Museum of Modern Art, the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, and Yvon Lambert, all in New York. Barry’s major work includes the "Carrier Wave", the "Radiation Piece", and the "Inert Gas" piece. These last two works involved Barry opening bottles of inert gases in different settings before a group of spectators. Barry lives and works in Teaneck.
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1980Untitled
1983Untitled
1988Untitled
1988Untitled
1989Untitled
1989Untitled
1989Untitled
1989Wallpiece with blue mirror words
2006Word Lists
2009Blue Cross
2009Nothing is Forever
2010Untitled
2010Something That Needs Something Else To Survive
2011Untitled
2011Study for Wallpiece
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Robert is not a religious person. He said it’s a loaded term that has too much to do with God, or hippies, and whatever — or at least it once did.
Aimed at confronting non-visual and esoteric subject matter, Barry employed a variety of media and approaches such as telepathy, radio waves, invisible gases, and words. He focuses on the transitional and impermanent aspects of space in art, along with the people surrounding, reacting to, and artists rather than the objects themselves. Robert Barry adhered to the artistic traditions of Conceptual Art. Barry's work focuses on escaping the previously known physical limits of the art object in order to express the unknown or unperceived. Consequently, Barry has explored a number of different avenues toward defining the usually unseen space around objects, rather than producing the objects themselves.
Quotations:
"I try to deal with things that maybe other people haven't thought about, emptiness, making a painting that isn't a painting. For years people have been concerned with what goes on inside the frame. Well maybe there is something going on outside the frame that could be considered an artistic idea."
"Nothing seems to me the most potent thing in the world."
"My idea of painting was that those yellow squares, being put on the wall as delineating a virtual square or rectangle, were involving the wall itself within the piece and, in this sense, compared to what is usually a work of art, a painting, this piece was somehow reversing the usual terms of the esthetic proposition. Usually, you see the painting and you ignore the wall. Here you had the wall coming through the painting — and the painting itself, the painted pieces, become a standpoint to make the wall appear."
Quotes from others about the person
Barry is part of a generation of artists that gave up traditional aesthetic methodologies in order to reappraise the meaning of art... His use of language, along with photography, and experiments with a range of other materials and media helped transform the way we look at and think about art today."
" Barry was one of the first to see that mass and volume in sculpture were not dependent upon visibility... But also, and perhaps more importantly, that language was a necessary component to communicate the idea in conceptual art.
Barry moved to Teaneck, New Jersey in 1974, with his wife and two sons.