Seam, Scar, Sign

Press Release

April 25 – May 25, 2019
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 25, 6-8 pm

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to present Seam, Scar, Sign, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Yevgeniya Baras. This will be the artist’s second solo show at the gallery.

Baras’s painting style is emphatically tactile and her intimately scaled works contain a visceral physicality. Each surface, usually canvas or burlap, is built up with layers of impastoed oil paint, bits of wood, and paper pulp. The paintings are intended to be read in relief, gaining resonance through the artist’s visual play with depth and surface, while subtly intruding into the viewer’s space. The use of seams (or scars) in the construction of the paintings serves as a drawing device, which further activates the compositions.

In her latest body of work, Baras’s color palette has shifted. After a residency at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, dusty ochres, pinks, and greens have seeped into her paintings from the immersive desert landscape. Throughout her soft geometry, tableaus and abstracted patterns are interwoven with letters from the Roman and Cyrillic alphabets. Letters and numbers are rendered in wood and paint functioning as signs or signifiers as well as conduits of meaning. Baras intuitively integrates glyphs, symbols, and traces of language into her most recent works, allowing the artist to point to communication in the creation of her new talismans, while continuing to evolve her idiosyncratic visual language.

Yevgeniya Baras (b. Syzran, Russia, lives and works in New York, NY) received an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BA in Fine Arts and Psychology as well as a MS in Education from the University of Pennsylvania. She has held solo exhibitions at the Landing Gallery, Los Angeles and Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York. Group exhibitions include White Columns, NY; Gavin Brown’s enterprise, NY; Sperone Westwater Gallery, NY; Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Detroit; Thomas Erben Gallery, NY, among others. Baras was a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner grant and the Chinati Foundation Residency in 2018. She received the Artadia Prize and was selected for the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program and the MacDowell Colony residency in 2015. In 2014 she was named the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Emerging Artist Prize. In 2019, Baras was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.