Coming to Los Angeles’s La Luz De Jesus Gallery this October, the botanical pieces of Texas-based artist Dan Barry are a gently eerie reminder of the cycle of life, and that growth is itself a dying process. The Florist and Garden Miscellany collects over sixty pieces by the mixed media/found image collage artist and “invites us to reflect and embrace the place of love, loss and the passage of time in our own lives.”
Barry, like so many others, found himself isolated and disenchanted when the events of 2020 lead to the cancellation of all of his planned gallery shows. But the unexpected year at home provided plenty of inspiration. “I began looking through my flat file drawers of paper and rediscovered a collection of hand colored botanical prints that I had not thought about for a long time,” Barry tells Stephen Romano, proprietor of New York’s Stephen Romano Gallery.
“The botanicals are from bound volumes of Paxton’s Magazine of Botany from the 1840s. I set the stack on my work table and began to draw, collage and build up a history of marks on them. It was a liberating way for me to once again get going in the studio. Over the following months these meanderings resulted as a chronicle of my days, thoughts and reactions to the world around me.”
Dan Barry’s The Florist and Garden Miscellany will be on exhibition from October 2nd-31st 2021 at the La Luz De Jesus Gallery. For more information, visit the gallery’s website or danbarryart.com.
