Barnaby Furnas Biography

Process is essential to Furnas' compositions, with content following form as the artist endeavours to make paintings that are analogous in their construction to how they function in the world. Pitched between depicted action and the act of painting, paint's illusory potential and its materiality, Furnas's work always imparts a visceral hit while drawing attention to its own manufacture. In his rock concert paintings, for example, impeccably crafted confusions of foreground and background, or picture planes traversed by lattices of stage light beams snag the eye, creating a pictorial equivalent of the heady confusion of the arena. In other works filigrees of painted bullet holes seem to pepper the surface, their Rorschach-like arrangements intimating a frenzied psychological dimension in tandem with the depicted scene. Furnas’ Flood paintings, such as Red Sea Parting, 2006, and Last Day (Red to Black in 6 Parts), 2013, raise the stakes on colour field painting, rendering it overwhelming, apocalyptic. "A painting is interesting to me to the degree that I can integrate myself in its making,” Furnas says. "The paintings are at their most engaging when they are making themselves." 

In his Creation series, for example, Furnas' technique integrates wholly with concept, as his method of pouring paint along a grooved surface on the canvas introduces gravity into the work in a physical and literal sense, while the imagery depicts the sequence of events leading to the Fall of Man. What these paintings share are intimations of heightened emotion and suggestions of altered states - where in ecstasy and agony, the hallowed and the hellish are revealed to be the nearest of neighbours.

Born in Philadelphia in 1973, Barnaby Furnas lives and works in New York. The artist received a Master's Degree in Fine Arts from Columbia University in 2000, and has staged numerous solo presentations at institutional venues including The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Missouri, 2015; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, 2012 and 2007; Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Colorado, 2009–2010, and Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle, 2005. His work has recently been displayed at exhibitions including Civil War Contemporary Remix, Alexandria Museum of Art, Louisiana, 2014; Surveyor, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, New York, 2011; Inside the Painter's Studio, Stephen D. Paine Gallery, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, 2011; Contemporary Magic: A Tarot Deck Art Project, The National Arts Club, New York, 2010, travelling to the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, 2011; Roundtrip: Beijing-New York Now, The Ullens Center (UCCA), Beijing, 2010; Something About Mary, The Metropolitan Opera, New York, 2009–2010; The Old, Weird America, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2008, travelling to DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Massachusetts and Frye Art Museum, Seattle; The Fractured Figure, Deste Foundation, Athens, 2007–2008; Dream and Trauma: Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection, Kunsthalle Wien and Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, 2007; and Between Two Deaths, Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany, 2007.

Text courtesy Victoria Miro.