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Exhibitions | Press Release

In 1947, Clement Greenberg wrote in The Nation that Gertrude Barrer was one of the most promising young painters in the country . In expressing the complex knowledge of things behind the seen world, Barrer explored both Paul Klee’s vision and ancient Native American picture-writing language. Greenberg stated, In Barrer’s hands, Klees’ influence serves admirably to expand the absolutely flay and formal patterns of Northwest Indian art and render them permeable to contemporary feeling.

In the 1940s Barrer visited Taos, New Mexicao. Her experience of the desert landscape and the art of the Southwest Native Americans is profoundly expresed in her elaborate traceries of life forms, cross-hatching and undulating dotted pathways that lay out many dimensions at once.

Barrer’s later work evolved toward a more epic scale replacing the tighter structures of Indian Space painting. Thus, in 1950, the spiraling calligraphic energies, organic structure and turbulent atmosphere of Mountain Winds reflect a strong affinity with Abstract Expressionism.
Barbara Hollister

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Selected Exhibitions

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