Hayley Barker is an American painter. Exhibition A has described Barker's painting practice as the following: "Barker's main subject is the natural world, which she renders expressively in oil on linen. The intuitive undercurrent in her approach enlivens the real and imagined scenes she paints, allowing viewers to pierce directly through to the space between things."[1][better source needed]
Hayley Barker was born in Oregon. She received her BA from the University of Oregon, and her MA & MFA in Intermedia from the University of Iowa. She has solo exhibitions with Shrine NYC, including a solo booth at the Armory Art Fair. She has had work featured at La Loma Projects (LA), Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Chicago), Big Pictures LA, GAS (LA), " The Glendale Biennial" curated by the Pit at the Brand Library & "The Divine Joke", curated by Barry Schwabsky at Anita Rogers Gallery (New York). She has shown with Bozo Mag for the past several years. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Of Barker's first solo exhibition in New York with Shrine in 2020 Barry Schwabsky, art critic and historian, writes:
"Barker's paintings elaborate spaces that can't be nailed down and identified. She calls them "spaces of passage," of transition—across the immeasurable distance from life to death, perhaps, but also within life, from one physical or spiritual state to another. Her works speak of mystery, loss: intimations of what lies beyond the boundaries of the self."[2]
In 2011, art critic Sue Taylor reviewed Barker's show "Cathedrals" in "Art in America". Taylor writes:
In depictions of sylvan streams and animated skies, Barker conveys a hypersensitive communion with the environment; in the process, she also imparts, with thick impasto and buttery surfaces, an ecstatic sense of the sumptuous materiality of oil paint.[3]
Taylor compared Barker's paintings to the work of Georgia O'Keeffe and Vincent van Gogh. Barker's "Cathedrals" is inspired by the childhood diary of Opal Whiteley, who had visionary, spiritual experiences but was later diagnosed as schizophrenic. Taylor writes:
In art, as in religion and madness, consciousness can be other than ordinary. Barker strives to imagine and approximate this deranged susceptibility, listening attentively for voices in the wind.[4]
