Steven Barbash
Painter & Print Maker
Steven Barbash; Art Professor at Cortland State University, Painter & Print Maker. Everyone will be struck by the extraordinary precision and radiance of the paintings in this exhibition by Steven Barbash. Neither of these qualities is new to him; he has been making remarkable images for over fifty years and has become a kind of alchemist in his ability to transform the simple and the prosaic into the extraordinary and the poetic.
Like many great painters before him, Barbash has settled his gaze on humble flowers, which can be seen either as objects of extreme simplicity or of inordinate complexity. Moreover, the artist set himself a straight forward yet still paradoxical task: how to present that which is inherently impermanent and unstable as a paradigm of a truth that is immutable and unchanging. We see his flowers at the zenith of their lives, their perfect moment. Painted as they grew before his eyes in his garden, his tulips, his poppies and irises are not frail, but strong and heraldic, almost most strident in their isolation and high key color.
Just as one always wants to get close to a flower, one always wants to get close to a Barbash painting. From no artist can one ask for more.
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