Through an aesthetic of scientific precision comprised of exact lines, perfectly rendered angles, and meticulous installation Robert Barry creates spaces conductive to the most humane activity possible; environments where intense contemplation on levels both primitive and complex, and the range between, are engendered

Beginning November 12th, Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc. will display an exhibition of new and old works by the seminal conceptual artist Robert Barry. The surfaces of the gallery walls will be blanketed in mirrored vinyl words carefully chosen by Barry. And while Barry will continue with his adoption of language as an artistic tool, an essential element in his oeuvre for decades of artistic innovations, it is put to new use here in that it will function in synergy with a single video that centers on the recent American conflicts with areas such as Iraq and Afghanistan. The visual component of the video will consist of a blackened screen, where additional words, one at a time, will function as windows through which viewers of Barry’s previous exhibitions are visible. The audience of this current exhibition will be subtly and subversively confronted with issues that are often far-removed from the rarified, elite nature of contemporary art. Initially, they will see the words covering the walls, but upon closer inspection, they will find their own reflections mirrored in each individual letter, paralleling the figures embedded within the letters in the video installation. Thus, a collateral union will take place, forming a circuit between these two otherwise unfamiliar entities. The video installation emits an audio record of the poignant recollections of American war survivors, which is juxtaposed with the leisurely manner with which the black and white figures on the screen view Barry’s exhibitions. This, in turn, challenges the audience to somehow reconcile their own positions of leisurely enjoyment while the warfare and bloodshed continues.

Barry’s use of language in the past has created an entirely unique linguistic system, one neither prose nor poetry, but instead, a system where groups of words floating across the surfaces of canvases, paper, walls, or even windows and grass fields, have lead to open-ended contemplations, which are guided and shaped in ways that are specific to each individual’s thought pattern. Here, this removed meditation is transfused from these resolutely intangible spheres to the grim realities of mortality. Barry’s presentation will merge the previous spaces he has produced “to be free to think” on a personal, more abstracted level, with the grave, pressing issues in regard to US foreign policy; thus leading to both a personal, intellectual evaluation of these conflicts of global politics, as well as visceral thoughts concerning death, both within the context of their own lives as well as the ongoing US wars. Barry poses these ideas to his audience while they wander the somber, empty save their own reflections in words, rooms and corridors of the gallery, formerly a domestic space filled with the warmth of a family, followed by the vocalized reveries of survivors lingering and echoing behind them.