Photo by Alex Delfanne, courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London

Anna Barriball, "Mirror Window Wall I" (2008). Ink on paper, 102 x 79 in.

March 2009 Reviews

Hans Hoffmann

R. H. Quaytman

Peter Rostovsky

Josephine Taylor

Alex Bag

Kirsten Stoltman

Bia Davou

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige

Renée Green

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Holy Inspiration: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Art

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Anna Barriball employs minimalist and conceptualist strategies with a rigor that suggests empirical propriety, yet her experiments with found objects and materials are rife with phenomenological paradoxes concerning art, matter, and the passage of time. She has painted the surfaces of buckets and captured the breathy sucking motion of air through a chimney, but she is perhaps best known for graphite rubbings of everyday surfaces that agitate the associative borders between two and three dimensions, drawing and sculpture. The latest body of work is undoubtedly a continuation of her process-led dialogue with those two mediums, but Barriball appears to be pushing her whimsical material discoveries and meditations off-map into a darker, less comfortable theoretical territory.

The Berlin-based British artist has quite wisely dealt with the gallery as a set of surfaces in order to avoid being overawed by the gargantuan space they collectively create. The resultant show is an extraordinarily stark, churchy affair consisting mainly of a framed series of "wall drawings" (cotton paper laid over brickwork and saturated with silver ink). For all their shroudlike preciousness, there is something quite suffocating about Barriball’s creation of a skin, a hermetic impression that is the very antithesis of the openings implied. In addition, thousands of leaf shapes appear to have been cut from retro fabrics and scattered to freedom, if possible ruin, across the floor. Nothing here, though, can compete with the claustrophobia of her partial rubbing of a stained-glass "sunrise," in which a source of light and color becomes a metallic memorial to an old-world craft. Words such as poetic and authority are often used in descriptions of Barriball’s practice, but these spectral facsimiles and historically loaded fragments reveal the inherent anxiety of her preservationist activity, as if it all might disappear tomorrow.

"Anna Barriball" originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' April 2009 Table of Contents.