Everyone seems to think about time eventually, at one point or another. How decades can pass by in a blink. How certain yesterdays can seem like a lifetime ago only a few hours later. The final ten minutes on the clock on the last day of school is of course a universal eternity. There never seems to be time for certain things to get done. And the right time never seems to come for others. Terrible politicians get unimaginably more time than they deserve, while the time we get allotted with some loved ones seems incomprehensibly short. How much should we think about history? How do we dodge the pitfalls of being overly nostalgic? The past is so often not really past, in a Faulknerian sense, while other times it is irrevocably buried.

 

This exhibition coincides with Robert Barry’s 90th birthday on March 9th, 2026. Many of his newest paintings reference time. Although, like the majority of his works made over the last 60 plus years of his storied career, they remain generously open-ended. He creates situations with his art that prompts audiences to think. To commence their own open ended musings and reveries. Each individual thinking something different than Barry, and something unique from each other. His work at its core not only recognizes each of our infinitely different thought patterns, but celebrates this vast pool of collective ideas, relishing in the ultimate unknowability of it all. The sum total of each of his pieces includes this aggregate of singular responses, growing mysterious and inconceivable to any one person. There is something deeply humanistic about this, to so fully acknowledge the perspectives of others

 

For Barry, time is something that has been forever and will be forever. A continuum that everything is part of, including us. We are in it for a brief stay and we all deal with it differently. It has been, more or less, the subject of his art from the beginning.

 

In recent months Barry was the subject of a solo booth at Art Basel Paris and Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König published a comprehensive 544 page career spanning monograph, Robert Barry: The Defining of It... , edited by Mathieu Copeland. In the intervening years since his first solo show in 1964 Barry has been part of epoch defining exhibitions such as When Attitudes Become Form... at the Kunsthalle Bern and The Institute of Contemporary Art, London, Documenta in Kassel, the Venice Biennale, and the Paris Biennale. His work has been featured in solo shows at the Tate Gallery, London, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, along with scores of others. He was the first living artist to have a work permanently installed at the Musée d’Orsay, in the Salle du Fumoir. A comprehensive retrospective and accompanying catalogue of his early work, A Place To Which We Can Come, Works from 1963 to 1975 was organized by the Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Nürnberg, Germany and Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Switzerland. His work is included in the permanent collections of the world's major museums and foundations: the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Musée d'Orsay, Paris; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre George Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Kunstmuseum Winterthur; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Kunstmuseum, Basel, and the Ludwig, Vienna, to name just a few.

 

Barry earned both a BFA and a MA from Hunter College in New York City, where he studied with Robert Motherwell. He then became a Professor himself at Hunter for 16 years, until 1982. Additionally he taught at CalArts during Douglas Huebler’s tenure, Bard College, and others. He has been represented for decades by storied galleries: Leo Castelli, Yvon Lambert, Massimo Minini, Gian Enzo Sperone, Holly Solomon, Paul Maenz, Jack Wendler, Alfonso Artiaco, Sfeir-Semler, Greta Meert, Thomas Solomon, and more. Recent gallery shows have been held at Gallery Shilla, Krakow Witkin, Francesca Minini, Parra & Romero, Cristina Guerra, and Martine Aboucaya. The last decade in Los Angeles has included exhibitions at Marc Selwyn Fine Art and at Bethlehem Baptist Church, both curated by Thomas Solomon.

 

Robert Barry was born in 1936 in The Bronx, New York. He lives and works in Teaneck, New Jersey.