Hedwig Barry (b. 1969) is a Cape Town-based artist working in drawing, painting and sculpture. Her career as producer, director and educator across artistic disciplines continues to inform a dedicated studio practice that is rich, confident and prolific. Through a language of abstraction Barry explores the metaphors of “grounding” and “groundlessness,” and the politics of love, desire, care and repair. She sees her practice as a coming together of the personal and the public, the emotional and the intellectual, and the bodies, grounds, materials, desires and gestures which give meaning to these relationships.

Barry has an MA in Fine Arts (cum laude) from the University of the Witwatersrand (2020). Through a collaboration between Wits and BMW, Barry was commissioned to create two site-specific sculptures for the BMW headquarters in Midrand, South Africa (2021). Barry has been an artist-in-residence at the Nirox Foundation culminating in the presentation of her debut solo exhibition at the NIROX Sculpture Park in 2022. Barry has been commissioned to present sculptural work at the Spier Light Art Festival (2022) and also in2022 was artist-in-residence at the Tswalu Foundation in the Kalahari Desert of the Northern Cape. Her work is included in both South African and international privatecollections with her first institutional acquisition being the large-scale outdoor public sculpture “Crumple (Jeanette Schoon)” (2021), incorporated into the Constitutional Court of South Africa Art Collection (2022). Barry showed for Church Projects’ anti-Booth for ICTAF 2023, and presented a solo exhibition titled Unrest with Guns & Rain in October 2023.