Irene Barberis
Irene Barberis is an Australian based artist born in London, whose arts practice spans 40 years. Since 1984 she has worked with process and ideas of the ‘everyday’, ‘the end and beginning’, and is known for her provocative high-chroma exhibitions negotiating contemporary belief and faith through the use of cutting edge materials including plastics, silicones and new light forms. She is a painter, installation and new media artist working also with performative drawing and spatial kineasthetics. She has held over fifty solo exhibitions in Australia and abroad and participated in more than ninety group exhibitions. Irene is known also for her international initiatives, exhibitions and curatorial work with Drawing.
She is an academic and Founding Director of Metasenta® Projects, a global arts research 'satellite' which functions between Universities, arts organizations and artists. She has initiated multiple international arts projects in collaboration with artists and institutions in the UK, USA, the Middle East and the Far East.
Irene holds an MA from Melbourne University VCA and a PhD from Victoria University, Melbourne. Her current major Art and Science Project commences its international travel program in Europe in 2017 at the Brussels Cathedral/Basilica. The centerpiece of these exhibitions is her 36 x 3 mt illuminated artwork ‘The Tapestry of Light: Intersections of Illumination; and includes a T&H publication and documentary narrated by University of London’s Emeritus Professor Michelle. P. Brown.
She is the International Chair for the Crossing the Line: Drawing in the Middle East, and Global Drawing series of conferences (the latest in Florence 2015), is a keynote speaker and international Curator. She is a Senior Lecturer/Researcher at RMIT School of Art, working off shore in Hong Kong, and is a faculty member of the New York based Rome Art Program. Barberis received funding of $375,000 for her research with Metasenta®, and through this commissioned the major publication on Drawing, Contemporary Australian Drawing Volume 1 authored by Dr. Janet McKenzie. She is currently Co Director of gallery, Langford120 Melbourne, is Founder and Director of the Global Centre for Drawing and Metasenta Publications, publishing Australian and international artists. She is authoring two books by Thames and Hudson, The Tapestry of Light: Intersections of Illumination, and Metasenta®: A New Paradigm for Arts Education. Her work is held in museums, galleries, public and private collections around the world.
[Irene Barberis CV]
[IreneBarberis.net]
She is an academic and Founding Director of Metasenta® Projects, a global arts research 'satellite' which functions between Universities, arts organizations and artists. She has initiated multiple international arts projects in collaboration with artists and institutions in the UK, USA, the Middle East and the Far East.
Irene holds an MA from Melbourne University VCA and a PhD from Victoria University, Melbourne. Her current major Art and Science Project commences its international travel program in Europe in 2017 at the Brussels Cathedral/Basilica. The centerpiece of these exhibitions is her 36 x 3 mt illuminated artwork ‘The Tapestry of Light: Intersections of Illumination; and includes a T&H publication and documentary narrated by University of London’s Emeritus Professor Michelle. P. Brown.
She is the International Chair for the Crossing the Line: Drawing in the Middle East, and Global Drawing series of conferences (the latest in Florence 2015), is a keynote speaker and international Curator. She is a Senior Lecturer/Researcher at RMIT School of Art, working off shore in Hong Kong, and is a faculty member of the New York based Rome Art Program. Barberis received funding of $375,000 for her research with Metasenta®, and through this commissioned the major publication on Drawing, Contemporary Australian Drawing Volume 1 authored by Dr. Janet McKenzie. She is currently Co Director of gallery, Langford120 Melbourne, is Founder and Director of the Global Centre for Drawing and Metasenta Publications, publishing Australian and international artists. She is authoring two books by Thames and Hudson, The Tapestry of Light: Intersections of Illumination, and Metasenta®: A New Paradigm for Arts Education. Her work is held in museums, galleries, public and private collections around the world.
[Irene Barberis CV]
[IreneBarberis.net]
Current Projects and Exhibitions
Re Forming the line - blow cut melt
Langford 120
19 March - 16 April
Langford 120
19 March - 16 April
Tapestry of Light
Past Projects and Exhibitions
Cycladic
Langford120
November 21 – December 19
[Catalogue for Cycladic 2015]
[The Age Review: 'Our Pick of What's Showing in Galleries Around Town]
"Although the title of Melbourne artist Wilma Tabacco's latest body of work may draw connections to a culture of the early Bronze Age, the paintings, reliefs and works on paper in Cycladic might be read as an expanded form of minimalism. But her seemingly flat, interlocked colour planes, striking black motifs and gently glinting reliefs – comprising hundreds of circular, metallic discs or petals affixed to wooden board – shift and transform with time and vantage. The black formal gestures that anchor several of her paintings assume the guise of a kind of abstracted figuration. Others take the form of interlocked geometric shapes, like throngs of silhouettes. The play between abstraction and the evocation of the figure is magnetic. Tabacco's painted surfaces aren't nearly as flat as their first read. With proximity, their patina and the play of the brush become far more complex. Similar qualities belie her metallic works, the components of which reveal themselves to be cut-up paint tubes and wine-bottle seals."
Langford120
November 21 – December 19
[Catalogue for Cycladic 2015]
[The Age Review: 'Our Pick of What's Showing in Galleries Around Town]
"Although the title of Melbourne artist Wilma Tabacco's latest body of work may draw connections to a culture of the early Bronze Age, the paintings, reliefs and works on paper in Cycladic might be read as an expanded form of minimalism. But her seemingly flat, interlocked colour planes, striking black motifs and gently glinting reliefs – comprising hundreds of circular, metallic discs or petals affixed to wooden board – shift and transform with time and vantage. The black formal gestures that anchor several of her paintings assume the guise of a kind of abstracted figuration. Others take the form of interlocked geometric shapes, like throngs of silhouettes. The play between abstraction and the evocation of the figure is magnetic. Tabacco's painted surfaces aren't nearly as flat as their first read. With proximity, their patina and the play of the brush become far more complex. Similar qualities belie her metallic works, the components of which reveal themselves to be cut-up paint tubes and wine-bottle seals."