Sophie Barber

Sophie Barber’s paintings, ranging from large to tiny, depict that which she finds around herself. Natural and manmade imagery, like tents, houses, birds, and people, are painted against block-colour backgrounds. The simplicity of the composition alludes to folk art, with subject matter presenting itself as illusive visions rather than literal representations. Curiously and humorously, Barber works with existing images, like sculptures of Franz West, Giotto or Annie Leibovitz’s photographs of Kendrick Lamar, sometimes painting directly on magazine covers. The artist’s depictions are chunky, atmospheric, homely, yet secretive. In Barber’s hands, the mundane is continuously reimagined and recontextualised through the lens of abundance. ...

Chris Sharp Gallery opened in Los Angeles in January 2021. Founded by writer, curator and co-founder of Lulu, Mexico City, Chris Sharp, the gallery is focused on a mixture of emerging, mid-career and overlooked or historically neglected artists. With a strong core of artists based in LA, the gallery also represents a number of positions on the East Coast, the UK, and Europe. The intention of the program is to present fully-integrated practices which think plastically— practices in which politics and ideas are indivisible from materials and form.The personal and the idiosyncratic hold a privileged place in the gallery’s aesthetics, while humor (the weirder, the better) and craft are crucial to its quiddity, all of which tends to be conveyed with a certain spatial elegance which seeks to foreground every work of art as the humble miracle that it is. ...