Material Art Fair 2024

Chris Sharp Gallery is pleased to present a solo booth of the Hastings-based artist, Sophie Barber.

Sophie Barber is the consummate ‘outsider’, or maybe better yet, cultural tourist. 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 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 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 droll adulation and loving satire. Consider, for instance, her work, “Kendrick Loves Camber Sands”. Crudely painted at large scale, the work appropriates a well known image of the rapper Kendrick Lamar and stentoriously declares him to be a fan of a beach near where Barber lives, a region he has most likely never even be to, never mind that he is probably not even aware that it 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, coarsely fashioned supports upon which the West sculptures become tiny, antic doodles. Indeed, it’s as if the work vacillates between the stentorian and the whispered. In every case, her use of and insistence on unconventional supports– large unstretched canvas or small, home-made 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 (through inflation) the self-important, precious and self-preening enterprise of painting.

The work for her solo presentation at Material Art fair, which revolves around the theme of Mexico, insists on her status as cultural tourist. Playfully engaging icons and cliches of Mexican cultural production (Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Gabriel Orozco), Barber sketches out a series of ambivalent homages to giants of Mexican modernism and post-war art, while assuming a disarming familiarity with them and Mexico in general, where it just happens, Barber has never even been. And yet has she? The claim by the Mexican novelist, Álvaro Uribe, that ‘no one ever goes to Paris for the first time’ feels germane here. At this point, one could say the same of Mexico, so thoroughly embedded is it in the global imaginary.