Since 2013 I have been working in formats that juxtapose vertically oriented paintings that without my further intervention and elements of collage are purposely formally incompatible. Imposing design, color and line, I am interested in coaxing two, three or sometimes four painted elements of color and form that represent opposing forces and ideas into a co-existence more significant and exciting than any of them singly.
“In this recent exhibition (Palmer Museum, Pennsylvania State University, Penn State, PA) Barr-Sharrar separates herself from the classical Abstract Expressionism upon which her painting of the 1970s was based. She moves to a different format. These new pictures still retain the gesturalism of her previous work, but it is used within the demanding format she now chooses. Within the set-up of seemingly astringent boundaries the new work consists of an interplay of vertical and horizontal in which bars of paper are laid horizontally upon the verticality of larger paper sheets.”
“These bars form panels, each with an integral statement which establishes a relationship to the other panels, as a bar of music even while separating itself contains a relationship to the whole ensemble. So we have meaning inside the picture and meaning within the context of other paintings in the exhibition.”
“This meaning founded upon a gestural statement varies within the separate paintings. We move from sweet to solemn, from dark to sunset, and there is much inventiveness here mingled with an inevitable solemnity of purpose. In this exhibition there is no doubt that Barr-Sharrar is onto something new. Her approach is filled with possibilities. Now her painting exists in terms of a progression of sequences placed in time, sequences that emerge within a thoughtful and reflexive context.”
“She gives full expression to the natural energy of the gestural sweep begun in the earliest work of the 1985, painted as she mourned the death of her father (Commemoration). In a more austere work of 1993 (Untitled) we discover forms of intellectual selectivity. For instance, the daring size of the block of the top panel is softened in the middle lower ground as two similar blocks are excitingly reduced by brushstrokes. The picture than balances itself at the bottom with one long rectangular strip. This adding and reducing…illustrates her concept of space within a conceit of ideas. We recognize she has presented us with the sprightly progress of several ideas within an intentionally self-sustaining format. ”
“Everywhere there is a steady use of color forming decisions. Cleared patches often appear visibly in movement. She has a good eye for cloud effects when she wants to permit nature into her picture, but nature is not dominant. Ideas and emotive values command this innovative exhibition. With her pictorial inventiveness the painter has combined a wish to control the carefully allotted space and the decision to release it in gestural expansion.”
Barbara Guest, Art in America, March 1995
In this gallery are paintings representative of the artist’s work on canvas from 1980 until the end of the 1990s.
“A big scale ambition underlies these paintings (at the Livingstone-Learmonth Gallery, New York), in which clusters of ambiguous forms tussle together in a luminous two dimensional space. The problems of the grand scale in the nineteen-seventies are tackled squarely and fairly.”
John Russell, The New York Times, March 1, 1975
“The recent paintings of Beryl Barr-Sharrar (from 1979, at the New York gallery Art Galaxy) are murals without a name, large non-figurative panels of great linear force. Drawn in daringly associated colors, they have a calligraphic intelligence and delicacy.
The forms that float up in these complex works are maddeningly evocative. They seem to be in flux, so vital that they might almost be rearranging their relationships to one another. Which is in the fore, which reaches out to us from the canvas, and which waits its turn? Events (how else to describe these intense tanglings of color) seem to be happening at different moments of time, as if the artist were depicting stored-up visual appearances.
So intense, so interesting are these paintings that we might well want to name them after grandiose classical subjects—“Laocoon,” or “Alexander’s Feast.” Equally, “Force of the Fern” might pertain, the paintings are that intuitively observant of nature.”
Mary Smith, Profile in Gallery Guide, March 1981
“Beryl Barr-Sharrar’s luxuriantly colored, tensely organized abstract canvases show that the movement is still a vital one.”
John Ashbery, International Herald Tribune, December 12, 1962
“Beryl Barr-Sharrar is one of the most talented young painters in Paris. These abstract canvases are dazzling rich in color and endlessly inventive in line.”
John Ashbery, International Herald Tribune, March 9, 1965
“Beryl Barr-Sharrar’s work has the vigor and knowhow of American action painting at its best, and the refinement of color of the School of Paris. The result is both captivating and awe-inspiring.”
John Ashbery, International Herald Tribune, June 15, 1967
