Robert Barry

Robert Barry, considered one of the pioneers and the most representative artists of the Conceptual Art movement, was born in New York City in 1936 and completed his B.F.A., M.A. at Hunter College, The City University of New York. He lives and works in New Jersey.

Around the middle of the ’60s, Barry starts investigating the space around the canvas as well as the space within and the placement of the work in the exhibition context as a primary component of the artistic operation. Transcending the physical limitations of space and material, Barry has produced non-material works of art, installations, and performance art using a variety of otherwise invisible media (including radio waves and telepathy), challenging what would be accepted as “typical” artistic practice or experience. In 1969 Barry released prepackaged liters of noble gasses into the atmosphere in several locations in Southen California, including Beverly Hills and the Mojave Desert; the actual performance was invisible to the viewer and only later the artist provide photographs as documentation. Through this and other works and performances, the artist questions the limits and the true nature of perception, our senses possibilities in relation with often unknown and intangible elements: Barry’s conceptual drive was to produce art that wasn’t aesthetic and which without documentation would be completely invisible to the eye.

In the early ’70s Barry decides to focus on the word, as a unique vehicle of meanings and privileged tool of communication. The words in capital letters, painted on a canvas, written on walls or surfaces, printed on paper, projected on slides or carved, evoke narrative and inspire contemplation. Fundamental for the artist is the specialization of the word, the relationship between this and the emptiness around it.

Barry encourages free association of meaning to his works. Faced with a great variety of meanings and signifiers, the fundamental constant of all his research remains the fact that between his mind and the public’s gaze, there is a passing of ideas and concepts, not pre-established and intentional messages: a point of arrival and a departure that becomes the real creative engine of his work. To Robert Barry “art is a language and has roots in the language”.

His work has been included in epoch-making exhibitions such as Live In Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form curated by Harald Szeemann at the Kunsthalle Bern and The Institute of Contemporary Art, London (1969) and Documenta V (1972). Since then, he has shown in innumerable important exhibitions all over the world including the landmark show, Reconsidering the Object of Art at LA MoCA (1995).

From the early 1970s, Barry has been the subject of various solo shows at important venues including the Tate Gallery, London (1972), the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1974), Museum of Conceptual Art, San Francisco, California (1978), The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago (1985) and the Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich (2001). 2003/04 saw a comprehensive retrospective and accompanying catalgoue of his early work, A Place To Which We Can Come, Works from 1963 to 1975 at the Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Nürnberg, Germany and Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Switzerland.

Barry’s work is included in the permanent collections of renowned museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Musée National D’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.