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Bill Barrett, one of today's foremost sculptors, was born in Los Angeles, CA. He earned a B.S. and M.S. in Design from the University of Michigan, and later an M.F.A. from the same institution. Since the mid 1960's Barrett has been exhibiting his unique metal sculptures and abstract paintings in numerous solo and group exhibitions in such places as the U.S., Switzerland, Bulgaria and Japan.
Barrett's sculptures of fabricated aluminum, bronze or steel address the interplay between positive and negative space with grace, elegance and exquisite balance. His works call to mind the fluid effortlessness of calligraphic strokes, and betray a positivism to which many viewers feel drawn. Others have said that Barrett's sculptures are distinctly American in their directness and lightness. His sophisticated constructions, through a delicate balance of form and content, transcend the starker aesthetics of minimalism with a warmth and humanity.
Barrett, who divides his time between New York City and Santa Fe, is represented in numerous private and public collections nationwide. Museum collections include the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, CT; the Cleveland Museum of Art, OH; the Knoxville Museum of Art, TN; the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, NM; the Harwood Museum, NM; the Fine Arts Museum of Oklahoma City, OK; the International Foundation Art Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, VA; the Utsukushi-ga-Hara Open Air Museum, Tokyo, Japan; and Runnymede Sculpture Farm, CA. His works have been installed on many university campuses, and he is frequently called upon to produce large public sculpture by commission.
Bill Barrett Sculpture
As their titles suggest, these works of Bill Barrett move with a grace and vitality. But their origins are deeper than the dancers and movements that their movements they so clearly evoke. Rodin, Henry Moore, the Futurists all had an influence on Barrett, and here one gets a glimpse of Degas. the more profound influences have come from two-dimensional art: expressionism, Asian calligraphy and, deepest of all, surrealism. Surrealism as process rather than image; Surrealism as access to the locus of memory and feeling, to the place where the human inclination to sing and to move gracefully has its origins.
Representing the evanescent in bronze is no mean feat. For Barrett, it took 40 years of refining technique to the point where the point of technique could disappear in works that were as much essence as object.
His enabling invention starts with his drawing forms freely in wax. He selects and combines these elements into free-standing wax models the best of which are cast in bronze. The larger versions he fabricates - impeccably - from bronze sheet. Through it all, the expressive freedom of drawing is retained but, inevitably, the process is influenced by temperament. How lucky we are that this sculpture's temperament in defiance of the aesthetic rules of the age, avoids the dark places of our subconscious to create works of verve and harmony and, in the ultimate act of defiance, of sheer beauty.
-Philip F. Palmedo, author of Bill Barrett, The Life of a Sculpture
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Bill Barrett Painting
Barrett has also produced a body of lively paintings that bear a remarkable genetic relationship to the sculpture (yet another connection). The waltzing energy of these paintings echos the fluid, organic vigor of the sculpture. It is a rare treat to see both sculpture and paintings presented in the same venue. It is as though Barrett has worked through the kinetic vitality of Action Painting in his sculpture, harnessed its fundamental energy in the unlikely media of metal, and then allowed it to reemerge on his own canvasses, civilized now by the heat and hammer of his hearth. The paintings are imbued with the same mastery of the curvilinear gesture and robust action as the sculpture, but instilled too with additional liveliness from the refined colors Barrett uses. If the sculpture are like magisterial visual symphonies in Barrett's artistic repertoire, the painting are light refreshing divertimentos of equivalent substance. Their presence together produces an even richer harmony.
-Kenneth R. Marvel, LewAllen Contemporary
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