Paris+ by Art Basel 2022

Born and raised in Hastings, England, where she lives and works to this day, Sophie Barber is the consummate ‘outsider’. This is not to say that she is not formally educated– she is– but rather that she is very aware of and plays with her status as a woman who is located neither at any center of the art world, nor the world of cultural production in general (i.e., Hastings, England). As such, she is always a kind of distant, if bemused spectator of the asymmetrical production and dissemination of culture, which often assumes a hyperbolic self importance and improbability in her portrayal of it. Whether she is depicting the work of other, often male artists, pop stars, or rappers, she does so with an ambiguous homage-like quality that exists somewhere between impish adulation and loving satire. Consider, for instance, her work, Kendrick on his way back from Camber Sands (2021). Crudely painted at large scale, the work is based on a well known photo of the rapper Kendrick Lamar and stentoriously declares him to be a fan of a beach near where Barber lives (“Kendrick Loves Camber Sands”), a region he has most likely never even be to, never mind that he is probably not aware that it even exists. By the same token, Barber’s exaggeration of scale can also and often does go the other way, as in, say, her very small depictions of outdoor Franz West sculptures on homemade supports upon which the West sculptures become tiny, antic doodles. It’s as if the work vacillates between the shouted and the whispered. Her use of and insistence on unconventional supports– large unstretched canvas or small, homemade canvases which are stuffed with recycled canvas such that they take on a wonky objecthood– and her impasto application of paint seeks to challenge and deflate the self-important, heroic and self preening enterprise of painting.

For her solo presentation at Paris+, Barber concentrates on famous artists with dogs or their depiction of dogs. Supposedly larger than life, if not ‘geniuses’, artists, when depicted with or portraying dogs, are strangely humanized, rendered approachable, relatable, and even comic. This feels especially apropos in Paris, the city and historical locus known for engendering so many 20th geniuses, Picasso chief among them. Barber’s depiction of animals often performs this function, risibly humbling and humanizing through the nonhuman. The booth features a diverse mix of new large and small works, which reference, with great, if ham-fisted elan and touching absurdity, everyone from Manet to Picasso to many others, which have been made expressly for the fair