Background
Phyllida Barlow was born on April 4, 1944 in Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom. She is the daughter of Erasmus Darwin Barlow, a psychiatrist, who was a great-grandson of Charles Darwin.
Phyllida Barlow was born on April 4, 1944 in Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom. She is the daughter of Erasmus Darwin Barlow, a psychiatrist, who was a great-grandson of Charles Darwin.
Phyllida Barlow studied at Chelsea College of Art during the period from 1960 to 1963. She continued her studies and the same year, in 1963, she enrolled in the Slade School of Art (present-day Slade School of Fine Art), finishing the school in 1966.
Barlow also attended University College of London.
Phyllida started her career as a teacher at the Slade School of Fine Art in the late 1960s, a position she held until 2009. Her former students include Rachel Whiteread, Bill Woodrow, Steven Pippin, Melanie Counsell, Keith Wilson, Douglas Gordon, Tacita Dean, Conrad Shawcross, Tomoko Takahashi and Angela De la Cruz. Currently, she is an Emeritus Professor of Fine Art.
In the early 1990s, Barlow began to work with arrangements of sculptures. Consisting of large interrelated pieces, whose dimensions were determined by the height, width and length of the space in which they were shown, her works Depot and Truce focused on "the space between the objects and what that did to an audience, how the audience moved around the works and discovered each one of them".
Barlow’s recent work emerges from a 40-year practice, in which she has explored many of the inquiries of post-Minimalism: the effect of gravity on materials, the relation of the sculpture to the viewing space, the impact of added colour on perception of a structure, the push-and-pull between total abstraction and a work’s ability to evoke the body.
In the past years her sculpture has achieved a new visibility with the publication of the monograph "Objects For … And Other Things" (Black Dog, 2005) and solo exhibitions at Baltic, Gateshead, the Bloomberg Space in London and Space in Exeter. Barlow makes her work from a range of materials, such as felt sheets, wooden pallets, polystyrene, red masking tape and foam boards.
Phyllida had a major show at London's Serpentine in 2010.
Barlow launched the inaugural Slade Editions in 2013 with an original new limited edition print "Untitled: Dog Door". Slade Editions provides a regular opportunity to invite guest artists to make works in the Slade Print Studios. All proceeds raised from the sale of Slade Editions go towards scholarship funds for Slade students.
Phyllida's work has been presented in solo exhibitions around the world. In 2014, she was commissioned to create new work for the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain, London. In that year, she also opened a major survey of several hundred of her drawings at Hauser & Wirth Gallery.
In 2017, Phyllida represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale.
Phyllida is a well-known Emeritus Professor of Fine Art, who has had an important influence on younger generations of artists through her work and long teaching career.
In 2011, Barlow became a Royal Academician. Four years later, in 2015, she was made a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.
Quotes from others about the person
"If I had to define Barlow’s aesthetic, I would describe her as the mistress of the splodge. Her unruly sculptures are never pristine, precious objects, but instead wilfully rough-around-the-edges, slapped together out of lightweight, throwaway materials: plywood, polystyrene, foam, felt. Parts of Dock 2014 put me in mind of a frayed old armchair with the springs and stuffing showing. What I admire about Barlow is that she isn’t afraid to let it all hang out." — Alastair Sooke, an art critic
Phyllida is married to Fabian Peake.
