Billis/Williams Gallery is pleased to present BARBARA STRASEN: INSIDE THE IMAGINAL REALM, the gallery’s seventh exhibition of the Los Angeles based artist’s mixed media paintings. The exhibition features Strasen’s recent series of repeating pattern based paintings examining the complexities of what it means to be human. The exhibition opens with a reception on September 12th and continues through October 10th.
Barbara Strasen’s work walks the fine line between order and chaos. Her work seeks to make sense of the inexplicable, looking for ways to depict the disordered world in which we find ourselves. Her layering process utilizes seemingly diametrically opposed images combined to create visual harmonies that reveal congruence and commonality.
INSIDE THE IMAGINAL REALM features Strasen’s newest repeating pattern based paintings. Ranging in size from 11×14 inches to 60×40 inches, the paintings interweaves landscape elements with flora, fauna, and material culture objects. This layering and interweaving process is a hallmark of Strasen’s work – the juxtaposition of the unlike to create visual harmonies. Tightly bound by an internal compositional logic, the paintings invite the viewer to dig deeper and unearth a multitude of possibilities and ideas about the self and the cultures we inhabit.
Strasen’s extraordinary ability with color and form is apparent in these new works. The structure of the compositions is built from nature forms – mountains, clouds, branches, leaves. Within that structure, Strasen disperses birds, planes, jets, sunglasses, continents, and hands for the viewer to search out.
At 83, Strasen has been creating work for more than six decades and has watched the world undergo many cycles of change. From being a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s, to participating in the Whitney Biennial in 1975, to group shows at P.S.1 and solo shows at the Long Beach Museum, to being part of Herb and Dorothy Vogels’ noted collection, Strasen’s career has spanned a momentous number of years and accomplishments.
Alongside her painting practice, Strasen is known for her work with lenticular prints and large scale installations. Her large scale site-specific installations include a two level commissioned lenticular installation at LAX (Los Angeles, CA), a Los Angeles Dept. of Cultural Affairs permanent, site-specific installation at Sylmar Branch Library designed by Hodgetts and Fung (Sylmar, CA), an installation at the Wellcome Trust Art Collection (London, UK), and a permanent lenticular light wall installation at Grubb & Ellis Corporation (Austin, TX), among others.
The weighty and the whimsical walk comfortably hand-in-hand in Strasen’s new paintings. We live in a state of contradictory emotions and experiences, and these paintings embody the entanglements of contemporary life. Strasen’s work proposes that every memory contains multiple perceptions layered in a shifting hierarchy of priority. Memories do not remain constant, but are the result of a continuing process of perception and re-perception with our minds constantly trying to reconcile the sublime with the horrific, the trivial with the vital. Strasen’s work comments on and re-presents these ideas, seeking to reveal the interconnectedness of all things.
Strasen has taken different approaches to conveying her vision over her varied career. She pushes boundaries of painting, photography, printmaking, collage, and new media to create multi-image works that reflect upon the intricacies of the human condition. In her work, Strasen finds beauty and harmony in the turbulence and in so doing, shares with us a way forward. Barbara Strasen’s work is about reconciling the dark and the light, the mundane and the lofty, the witty and the poignant; it is about how to simultaneously hold two truths and at its core, the work is about what it means to be human.
Barbara Strasen (b. New York, 1943) received her BFA from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1963 and her MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1965. Strasen has exhibited extensively in museums and galleries across the USA and Europe including the Whitney Biennial (1975), the University of Southern California’s Fisher Art Museum, MoMA P.S.1, Long Beach Museum of Art, San Diego Natural History Museum, Grey Art Gallery at NYU, Islip Art Museum (New York), Het Apollohuis (Netherlands), Budapest Galerie (Hungary), Frauenmuseum (Germany), Galeria Soloblu (Milan) and the FlashArt Museum (Trevi, Italy). She also co-curated, with Mary-Kay Lombino (then Assistant Curator at the UCLA-Hammer Museum), the exhibition Contempo-Italianate at Loyola Marymount University’s Laband Gallery. Strasen’s work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, Artweek Magazine, the New York Times, Los Angeles Weekly, Artcore, among others. Her work is included in numerous public and private collections including the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC); the Wellcome Trust Art Collection (London); the Colburn School of Music Art Collection (Los Angeles); the Long Beach Museum of Art; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; the Austin Art Museum; the Frauenmuseum (Bonn, Germany); the Allen Memorial Art Museum; the Blanton Museum/University of Texas (Austin) and the collection of Herbert and Dorothy Vogel. Strasen lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
