(click image for more details)Standard #8, 2007
acrylic, enamel, ink and pencil on five separate panels of canvas on board
50cm x 70cm x 0.5cm
Templa, 2007
46cm x 70cm
Standard #9, 2007
50cm x 70cm x 0.5cm
Chris Barr's work exists somewhere in the space between painting and sculpture, the functional and conceptual. Whether working in two or three dimensions he mixes figurative images and recognisably 'real' objects with geometric abstraction and a playful subversion of the traditions of painting. He is interested in the way in which art forces us to question the hierarchical values of the real, and attempts to explore the rhetoric of power and authority invested in familiar codes and signs in order to renegotiate their status and validity. More recent works have explored heraldic composition with naïve figurative and geometric emblems, which attempt to 'evoke the irrational origins of certain pursuits within modernism'.
Barr describes his recent 'Augury' series (2007) as being concerned with '.
..the taking and interpreting of signs from nature and the embodiment of omens and auspices in the behaviour of birds. It's not a form of divination as we usually think of it, in that it does not attempt to foretell future events. Instead it's a practice of deciphering signs in order to seek approval for a proposed course of action.'1
Paul Stone, 2008
1. Interview with Laura K Jones, The Saatchi Gallery Online, May 2007.
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