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Vera Barnett
Dream II (after Henri Rousseau)

2011

About the Item

Vera Barnett is best known for creating elements of her composition—by sewing and painting plastic, building objects with cardboard and tape, and assembling found objects—then setting them up in her studio to paint as a still life. Barnett paints her still life arrangements in a trompe l’oeil manner so real as to confound the viewer. Barnett says, “I am drawn to art that explores the emotional relationships between people, their environment and circumstances that they find themselves in. I wish to reconstruct these ideas through my own vision, my life and experiences.” Vera Barnett has taken on a range of themes in her works, producing series of paintings inspired by phobias, famous artworks (as in her series "Classical Plastique,") or most recently the written word in her exhibition, “The Painted Word.” Barnett’s paintings, at once both still life and figurative, are first composed as hand-made maquettes in her studio. Once the scene is created – using sewn plastic and cloth, cardboard, tape, and found objects – Barnett paints her tableaus in astonishing trompe l’oeil. The figures’ fabricated textures are rendered so convincingly, yet their presence and humanity are fully authentic. In his essay, “The Fabrications of Vera Barnett: An Appreciation,” Frederick Turner writes of Barnett’s subjects: “To begin with, they have been painted with such loving classical attention that their cheap materials and tight or flaccid artificiality take on a kind of pathos, are ennobled by the attention they have been given.” Turner continues, “And here we come to what I believe is Barnett’s breathtaking – or rather breathgiving – reply to all the modernist and postmodernist critics of reproduction. Her paintings are not just reproductions, but reproductions of reproductions of reproductions, like humans and animals and plants, or like the repeats in wallpaper or cloth print patterns she uses as backdrops (themselves minutely and lovingly recorded). “ Barnett studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Bibliography: “Vera Barnett: Classical Plastique,” exhibition catalogue, with the essay “The Fabrications of Vera Barnett: an Appreciation” by Frederick Turner, Valley House Gallery, Dallas, Texas, 2010.
  • Creator:
    Vera Barnett (1957, American)
  • Creation Year:
    2011
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 50 in (127 cm)Width: 60 in (152.4 cm)
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Condition:
  • Gallery Location:
    Dallas, TX
  • Reference Number:
    Seller: 167461stDibs: LU257988713
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