Kerry Schuss Gallery

Press Release

Kerry Schuss presents a series of small richly painterly abstractions by Robert Barber. Dating from the early 1960's and made of tempera on roughly square sheets of paper, laid on board, the works in the exhibition were Inspired by the monsoon rains that visit Barber's home in Tucson, AZ, every summer. Applied with wide, generously loaded brushes in staccato, loosely gridded rhythms, the paintings evoke atmospheric landscapes drenched by watery elements. In tension with the feeling of worldly space, Barber's vigorous, blocky gestures merge into dry yet sensuous surfaces. Cezanne's landscapes come to mind as do paintings of the 1960s by Philip Guston, who was one of Barber's teachers at the University of Minnesota, where he was a graduate student in the early 1950's.

Robert Barber was born in Minneapolis in 1922, and received an undergraduate degree from the Minneapolis School of Art and an MFA from the University of Minnesota. After getting his degrees, he taught at Illinois University of Wesleyan for three years before moving to Tucson, Arizona in 1956. He has been producing art since his teens, yielding a vast array of extraordinary work spanning nearly three-quarters of a century, and continues to paint and draw on a daily basis at the age of 96.

The works in this exhibition are of a time when abstract painting could still be regarded as a radical gesture, particularly in the relative isolation of Tucson. Barber followed his own path in a small southwestern city in the Sonoran desert, where new art ideas and trends were barely known, much less appreciated. In that time, and over the next five decades, he has been a rare example of an artist producing advanced artwork far from any major art center or community. Outside of a few local Tucson exhibitions, Barber was virtually unknown until a 2015 full-scale retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson, co-curated by Anne-Marie Russell and Jocko Weyland.

Kerry Schuss introduced the work of Robert Barber to an international audience at Independent Fair 2016 in New York. This is Barber's third solo exhibition at Kerry Schuss gallery. In 2017 Del Deo & Barzune, New York mounted the two-person exhibition with Ray Parker / Robert Barber 1959 -1963. Barber's and Parker's paths crossed at the University of Minnesota where Parker was an instructor. Most recently, in 2018, Robert Barber's work was included in the American Academy of Arts and Letters annual "Invitational" exhibition.