Barber
Kathy
Born in Palmerston North in 1965, Kathy Barber now lives and works in Auckland. Barber has regularly exhibited in New Zealand and Australia since 2000, and is represented in private collections throughout New Zealand, Sydney, Melbourne and London.
Kathy Barber's paintings develop out of landscape, language, thoughts and emotions. In her more recent work, Barber entwines an abstract set of gestural marks with calligraphic letterforms to create representations of thoughts, forming entangled structures that are curling and complex, delicate and dense. Thoughts, these works suggest, are like intricate knots, their logic fine but elusive.
Barber's ability to show light as if shining from a celestial window, or flickering through water gives her paintings a special quality. Slowly and meticulously executed, the transparent glazes she uses create images that hover between the known and the imagined.
OMOIDE
25 July - 12 August 2017
Omoide is Japanese for memories. Barber's Omoide is a body of work with its beginnings in Japan. Her many visits there remain firmly embedded in her thoughts. Omoide paintings are a deep response to her Japanese experiences.
Yugen
21 June - 16 July 2016
Barber's Yugen paintings are a response to place. As a dedicated abstractionist, her success lies in control of surface effects and layers that hint at conversations barely heard.
undercurrent
26 August - 13 September 2014
In Undercurrent, we see a return to tonal blocks of colour, reminiscent of water, sky and the timeworn rock of a harsh climate, where the conversations are painted away, like light breaking through the canvas.
melancholia
7 - 25 May 2013
Melancholia is Barber's eighth solo show, presenting works each as different as the light or feelings they depict. Slowly and meticulously executed, the transparent glazes she uses create images that hover between the known and the imagined.
Chinese Whispers
12 Feburary 2012 - 6 March 2012
Mimicking chinese whispers, Barber allows her paintings to change, develop, run, to become abstract, to flow into one another as conversations, the original thoughts lost, buried of necessity within the overall images.
reading between the lines
7 - 25 September 2010
Barber's first solo exhibition at Orexart reflected the spareness of her former work, with a livelier and more expressive approach. Her personal lexicography of non-linguistic writing seem to free flow as if spontaneous, as they intersect, fold, circle and connect to clusters of bold roman characters.
