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Izzy Barber (b. 1990) is originally from Gowanus, Brooklyn, and lives and works in Queens, New York. Barber paints from life: immediacy and physical presence are at the heart of her practice. Working on-site, in public, often at sunset and into the last light of day and night, her highly impressionistic, at times three-dimensional brushwork charges her paintings with the physical and temporal proximity of their making.
Barber earned her MFA from the New York Studio School in 2017 and her BA in Studio Arts & Human Rights from Bard College in 2011. Her exhibition Badlands (2026, Pièce Unique, Massimo De Carlo, Paris) follows her solo exhibitions There Is No Time (2024, James Fuentes, Los Angeles), Waiting Game (2023, Studio d’Arte Raffaelli, Trento), Crude Futures (2022), and Maspeth Moon (2021) (both at James Fuentes, New York). Her work has been shown at James Fuentes, New York; Massimo De Carlo, Milan; Galleria Franco Noero, Turin; David Zwirner Platform; the New Orleans Arts Center; and the 2012 Brucennial, among other venues. She is a three-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant. Publications include Waiting Game (2023) and JFP03: Izzy Barber (2021).
Charles Moffett is pleased to present Clay Pigeons, New York-based artist Izzy Barber’s first exhibition with the gallery, organized in collaboration with James Fuentes.
In an era defined by speed and digital reproduction, Barber remains committed to observation, material experimentation, and the visceral experience of painting from life.
The new body of work includes paintings the artist made during three month-long cross-country road trips taken in 2025 and 2026. Working at the extremities of plein-air painting, Barber placed herself in unfamiliar and, at times, charged environments, allowing direct experience and the inherent limitations of her distinctive practice to shape her work. Her resulting paintings unearth the latent tensions stretching across the empty highways, border walls, and deserts of the United States.
Motivated by a relentless drive for exploration, Barber paints with the heightened visual clarity and charged excitement that come from her physical presence with her subject matter. Working on-site in public spaces, she captures compositions swiftly, painting wet-on-wet and infusing her paintings with a luminous quality, often punctuated by vivid flashes of color. Loose, gestural brushwork and a sensitive rendering of light and shadow combine with moments of sharp structure. Barber’s aim is never the precise replication of the scene before her, but rather to create paintings that capture and distill the full sensory experience of a place as she feels it.
As 2025 began, Barber recognized a profound sense of disconnection from the country, isolated in New York City and consuming news largely alone while staring into a private screen. Out of a need to physically confront our current national reality, Barber went west. The intimately scaled paintings that emerged embody that process of firsthand observation and, when seen together, hold a range of contradictions and complexities that characterize our era. Clear blue skies in Ajo, Arizona, are pierced by the insistent vertical stripes of the U.S.-Mexico border wall. Quiet nights in the rural towns of Cedarville, California, and Bassett, Nebraska, are placed in juxtaposition with paintings of armed National Guard troops on the streets of Washington, D.C.
This exhibition does not provide a simplistic or definitive narrative but instead offers a view of one artist’s unfolding, firsthand, impressionistic record of contemporary American life. Engaging directly with the potent subject of the nation’s immigration system, the paintings in Clay Pigeons expand both backward in time and across geographic locations. Connections emerge between paintings of the historic Japanese internment camp site at Tule Lake, California, the active immigrant detention center in El Paso, Texas, and the immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan. Barber concluded each of her trips by driving back to New York City, at times painting from the passenger seat of a moving vehicle, underscoring the literal ties that connect all of these places.
