Robert Barry (Bronx, New York, 1936) exhibits for the first time in Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art gallery, in Lisbon. The exhibition “ROBERT BARRY: work from the 1960’s, 2016 and 2017” presents two different moments from his work: very late works, presenting a group of recent pieces, produced over the last two years, and a selection of very early works, presenting a few seminal pieces that Robert Barry produced in the 60s. 

Barry’s work has been developed through the research of resources and of very diverse materials, like sound, word, film, slides projections, colour, space as an inscription plan, and the edition of artists books in which the relation between text and the readers time reveals a very particular importance on the spatiality that the book represents. 

In this point of view, language is an essential and functional element that the artist has been working with, integrating drawing, architecture and the photographic image. Even when the word is separated from a text, without losing its semantic value, it gets distant from a possible narrative, transforming itself into an activation object, opening other fields of possibilities by interpellating the spectator’s space as a materialised object. The same occurs with the use of colour, strictly connected with the process in which language and the word becomes a puzzle, confronting the spectator that observes it. Sometimes, the word functions as a trigger once applied on a wall or a window, fragmented as a drawing or a group of signs, revealing each time a new visual composition. 

Robert Barry’s work offers a constant challenge for both the receiver systems of artistic production and the perceptive capacity of each individual. Regarding this process and procedures, characteristics of his artistic practice, Robert Barry published in 1998 in Flash Art magazine a brief text as a statement, questioning the art system, that I here reproduce: 

“If there was anything important about conceptual art? If there was one thing? It was the way the work questioned the entire system. It really dug deep and revealed the relation between art and the viewer. What being an artist was about, and what conceptual art was about, was testing the limits of one’s perception, pushing it so far as possible, to the point of invisibility. I think conceptual art was the end of modern art. I think modern art was going out on a limb and then cutting off the limb to see what would happen.” 

João Silvério, March 2017