Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Barbara Sternberger. The process of solving while doing is central to Sternberger’s thinking in this new body of work entitled Continuum, almost as if she plans to get lost in order to find her way back home. This deliberate, studio-oriented strategy generates imagery that unabashedly reveals a history of making, full of erasure and accumulation, which together create a portrait of an artist in production.
A figure is oblique, forms and shapes abbreviated, compositions are simultaneously full and incomplete, reminding you perhaps of something once imagined then forgotten. Heroic gestures can still occur at an easel, and Sternberger's works have a psychic energy their physical size can barely contain. And they are hard to pin down, like articulating the experience of hearing great music in an amphitheater; beauty ricocheting off uncontrollable surfaces and entering you through more than one opening all at once. A subtle euphoria that can only happen while closely studying the unknown.
The layers are gauzy, a pile up of thick and thin marks, scratchy, sometimes even muscular but without flexing. Distant whispers of pencil scrawl are imbued yet still visible from within their fleshy surfaces. And the color: creamy spreads of ochres, bone whites, tiny shocks of crimson and unexpected blues populate a carefully curated playground of pictorial space by which the viewer is invited to certify with vaguely abstract terms. Formal issues such as color, light and space are set in balance with internal visions generated by personal experience. This all tracks when thinking of her allegiance to certain conceptual and aesthetic concerns set up by the Color Field and Abstract Expressionist painters before her.
Sternberger operates within a somewhat ephemeral painting sphere, a state of could be finished, and as the artist says, “hangs in the balance between mind and experience”. Like any serious work of art, hers is best experienced in real-time and with an open mind, because the unpredictability of seeing, being and feeling in front of a significant event is vital to any consequential human experience.
