Untitled #3

Audrey Barcio is an American abstract artist whose recent paintings examine where the heritage of Modernism intersects with the tools of the Virtual Industrial Age. She lives and works in Chicago.

For these works, Barcio begins by searching historical archives for Modernist abstract paintings that evoke in her a sense of the universal. She then pares down the visual languages of these paintings into new compositions that extend that historical lineage. After preparing her raw canvases with a grey and white checkerboard pattern, she translates her pre-planned composition to that surface using acrylic paint. During this step, Barcio modifies the composition freely according to her visual instincts and subconscious intuition in a “call and response” process inspired by the thinking of Elaine de Kooning, who said, “A painting to me is primarily a verb, not a noun.”