Unwelcomed Visitors (2021-2022)

One can see a great deal of Barwick’s visual vocabulary on display in the six paintings comprising Unwelcomed Visitors. Taking their names from songs that have had an influence on the artist, the works in this series foreground gesture as a key element of the finished composition. However, rather than using that gestural quality simply to suggest the presence of the artist at work (as in abstract expressionism), the most expansively gestural paintings here—Darkness Falls, Casting Shadows On The Wall (2022), Sound So Ominously Tearing Through The Silence I Cannot Move (2021) and What’s That Dreadful Rumble. Won’t Somebody Tell Me What I Hear (2021)—work in concert with the other somewhat more restrained paintings in the series to suggest those aspects of Barwick’s vocabulary that aren’t as explicitly present. If Barwick’s primary unit is the line, then Unwelcomed Visitors deconstructs that primary unit to varying degrees, resulting in works that are as playfully alive as they are intensely unbridled.