Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is pleased to announce “Stations of Attention” an exhibition of the newest paintings by Steven Baris. It will be Baris’ second solo exhibition with the gallery and will take place at the gallery’s 529 West 20th Street location from May 11th to June 15th, 2024. A reception for the artist will be held on Saturday, May 11 from 3-6.
Steve Baris considers his abstract painting to be diagrams that he creates in a persistent attempt to visually define and articulate the amorphous, and ineffable processes of everyday life. As he says “Essentially, diagrams are graphic displays that map otherwise invisible temporal processes and space-time relationships. This is precisely what I aim to achieve in my paintings.”
In this recent series of paintings “Stations of Attention” Baris is concerned with the practice at the heart of his Buddhist belief – the importance of paying attention. As hard as we might try, attention wanders and often gets lost in the millions of daily impressions life imposes. Baris uses the precise, concrete elements that make up his unique visual language - opaque circles floating in a vibrating field of lines - to create a diagrammatic visualization of attention as a highly fragmented and nonlinear operation. The paintings reflect the fact that although we believe the act of paying attention is one we can control, we are fooling ourselves.
Steven Baris was born in Aberdeen, Washington and grew up on various American Indian reservations in Northern California, Montana, and Washington State. He received an MFA from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. He has received a Pollack Krasner award and has exhibited widely in the US and internationally, in such museums and institutions as: National Museum, Lublin, Poland; Wilhelm Morgner Museum, Soest, Germany; Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Institute of Visual Arts in Kielce, Poland; Museum St. Wendel, Germany; Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, Penzance, UK; The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA; Ely Center of Contemporary Art, New Haven, CT; Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, Wilmington, DE; Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, NJ; Atelierhof Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany; INTERNATIONAL BIENNIAL OF NON-OBJECTIVE ART, Pont de Claix, France; Kunstlerhaus Dosenfabrik, Hamburg, Germany; Carnegie Mellon University Art Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA; University of Texas at Dallas, Dallas, TX; The Drawing Center, New York, NY, and more. His work is included in numerous corporate and private collections across North America, Europe, and Australia, as well as the museum collections of National Museum, Lublin, Poland, and Copelouzos Museum, Athens, Greece.
