Yevgeniya Baras | Stargazer

October 19 – December 9, 2023

Sargent’s Daughters is pleased to present Stargazer, an exhibition of new paintings by Yevgeniya Baras, the artist’s debut solo presentation with the gallery.  Baras creates highly textural works that move beyond the boundaries of their supports, including unconventional materials and craft techniques to generate evocative abstractions. 

Baras’ latest body of work was developed during a five-month fellowship in Tel Aviv, where Baras produced dozens of sketches and small works, which later evolved into the paintings on view. While there, Baras spent her time reading in museum archives and taking long walks through the city, learning from both ancient and Modernist histories.  Her observations from this period emerge in the work – their bright, light palette evokes the clear light of the Mediterranean, and some compositions seem to suggest archaeological sites or Bauhaus architecture.  Though this particular influence is new in Baras’ work, such an engagement with place and geography has long been central to her practice.  

The title Stargazer references a 6000-year old figurine, housed in the collection of the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens.  The small sculpture features an abstracted human figure, carved from white marble, its ovoid head tipped upward.  For Baras, this simple gesture resonates across the millennia, as the figure seems to gaze with awe and reverence at something beyond its reach.  The works on view are Baras’ manifestation of this spiritual or mystical impulse, weaving together personal, historical, and tactile elements to evoke contemplation of the eternal. 

Baras’ work combines a commitment to materials and craft with a deep interest in the history of abstraction. The supports of the works frequently resemble quilts, employing various textiles that might include burlap or the artist’s grandmother’s dresses.  Wood and other materials are hand-stitched onto the surface to create raised lines, which are then covered in oil paint.   The edges of the works are at once frames and borders to be crossed – they are sometimes bare, sometimes dyed, and sometimes trimmed with added fabric.  These paintings develop over the span of several years, as Baras reworks and adds layers to accumulate texture and meaning. The resulting visual lexicon is both expansive and iterative, as forms such as circles, triangles, and stars recur across the works. Other marks and compositions might evoke faces, cities, trees, ribcages, or writing, but none resolve into a legible image.   In this way, Baras’ profound engagements with materiality and history generate a rich symbolic vocabulary for viewers to interpret.

The artist would like to acknowledge Fulbright Israel for providing the opportunity to research and have the inner space to make new meaningful developments in her work.

Yevgeniya Baras (b. Syzran, former Soviet Union) is an artist based in New York. She has exhibited her work at galleries including White Columns (New York, NY); Nicelle Beauchene (New York, NY); Reyes Finn Gallery (Detroit, MI); Gavin Brown Enterprise (New York, NY); Inman Gallery (Houston, TX); Mother Gallery (New York, NY); Sperone Westwater Gallery (New York, NY); Thomas Erben Gallery (New York, NY) The Pit (Los Angeles, CA); as well as internationally including NBB Gallery (Berlin, Germany); Julien Cadet Gallery (Paris, France); Station Gallery (Sydney, Australia). She is represented by The Landing (Los Angeles, CA) and Sargent’s Daughters (New York, NY).

Yevgeniya is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner grant in 2023 and 2018. Baras was named Senior Fulbright Scholar for 2022/2023. She was a recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 2021 and the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. Baras was selected for the Chinati Foundation Residency in 2018 and the Yaddo Residency in 2017. She received the Artadia Prize and was selected for the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program and the MacDowell Colony residency in 2015. In 2014, she was named a recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Emerging Artist Prize. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, LA Times, ArtForum, The New York Review of Books, and Art in America.

Baras co-founded and co-curated Regina Rex Gallery in New York’s Lower East Side (2010-2018). Baras holds a BA in Psychology and Fine Arts and an MA in Education from the University of Pennsylvania (2003) and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2007).

Press

Yevgeniya Baras & Leeza Meksin in conversation: Lineage, Topography and How to Find the Way Home | Saturday, November 18, 2023

Artforum MUST SEE | November 1, 2023

Platform Art | October 28, 2023