Guns and Rain | Unrest by Hedwig Barry

Guns & Rain is pleased to announce Hedwig Barry’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, titled Unrest.

Produced during an ongoing period of physical itinerancy, this exhibition of paintings traces connections between place, feeling, nature and the political. In an entirely new body of work made in several locations around South Africa, Barry continues an exploration of what she calls “compulsive surfacing”, the building up of painted surfaces until the relationship between figure and ground becomes obscured.

Her abstract visual language is characterised by restless yet careful marks, a striking sense of movement, and a strong commitment to colour. The overwhelming surfaces of Barry’s works seduce the eye while disintegrating the figure-ground convention which is so embedded in our ways of reading the visual. In Western art history, the relationship between figure and ground, or the subject and the background, dominates the narrative of painting. According to this logic, the background is always subordinate to, and in service of, the subject, or the “main” content of the painting. This same history has been monopolised by male artists, critics and patrons, and, moreover, by a particularly aggressive way of relating to materials.

Barry’s work undercuts this combative approach to painting, choosing instead to coax forms out of dense, forest-like painterly environments, and to give space to excess. Instead of reiterating hierarchies in which a foreground subject diminishes the background, Barry creates all-over paintings in which the ground is at once everywhere and nowhere. The related metaphors of “grounding” and “groundlessness” have preoccupied her practice since she started her Masters in Fine Arts in 2019, and connect her work to nature, the earth and our tools for orienting ourselves in relation to place. 

Barry situates her practice as part of a rich and underrated tradition of women painting. Recalling the work of artists such as Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Linda Benglys, Cecily Brown and Rachel Jones, Barry’s paintings explore the relationships between form and formlessness, precision and freedom. Wholly immersed in a painting process that balances intuition, expression, calculation and meticulous calibration, she questions what painting is and does today, how we make meaning from the visual, and what is at stake for those who exist precariously, whether by choice or necessity.