For Immediate Release How are the bits and pieces of expression we choose made vivid enough to be a valid art form? Gertrude Barrer (1921-1997) Woodbury, CT - Fenn Gallery announces its exclusive CT representation of the estate of Gertrude Barrer (1921-1997), and its premier exhibition of over 40 works on paper spanning her more than five decade career. In 1947, Clement Greenberg wrote in The Nation that Gertrude Barrer was one of the most promising young painters in the country. Greenberg stated, In Barrer’s hands, Klee’s influence serves admirably to expand the absolutely flat and formal patterns of Northwest Indian art and render them permeable to contemporary feeling. Barrer explored both Paul Klee’s vision and ancient Native American picture writing language while a member of the historically significant Indian Space Painting movement in the 1940s. In emulating the flattened forms and all over design of Indian painting, the group sought to eliminate the final traces of spatial illusionism from Cubism and to create an American art independent of European reference. These Native American influences on artists working during this period were the inspiration for groundbreaking developments in abstract painting which ultimately led to Abstract Expressionism, and according to Lawrence Campbell writing in Art in America, February 1992, a contributing element of the New York School. In the 1950’s, Barrer replaced the linear structure and narrative of Indian Space painting with a more expressive intensity of movement and painterly surface bearing a closer affinity to Abstract Expressionism. Barrer stated that she was seeking an art form that would bring together in form and color, the elements that could express the transforming forces and complexity of the world in which she lived: I spent a long time trying to understand how to paint tenuous subjects - the wind, emotions. The problem was how to get inside the underlying forces. Later in her career, Barrer evolved towards figurative paintings and drawings primarily of women, in whose often tender yet slightly sad, knowing yet questioning expressions, perhaps hint at self-portraiture late in her life. Throughout her stylistic periods is the timeless expression of things behind the seen world. Barrer lived in New York City until relocating to
Roxbury, CT in 1959. She studied at the Julliard School of Music,
the Art Students League and under Will Barnet and Phillip Guston.
Her work was included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, NY,
NY in 1952, 1954 and 1957, and has been discussed in leading art
periodicals and news publications. ###
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