Alvaro Barrington: On Influence
VAULT chats with London-based artist Alvaro Barrington about his interdisciplinary and dialogical approach to making art, and staying true to self.
Image credit: Installation view Alvaro Barrington Spider the Pig, Pig the Spider, South London Gallery, 2021. Photo: Andy Stagg. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London © Alvaro Barrington
“There are so many strategies to being an artist,” says Alvaro Barrington from his London studio. “For the artist I’ve always wanted to be, I incorporate a process of just trying to understand things – maybe never reaching that full answer or resolved world view, but instead using painting as a means to make sense of a world that’s always changing, and where I’m always changing too.”
A constant within the 39-year-old artist’s life has been living between various worlds; vastly different experiences compacted within the same geographic area or time-frame. Born in Venezuela in 1983 to a Grenadian mother and Haitian father, Barrington’s mother died when he was
10 years old and he was raised by aunties in Brooklyn. A continual process of meaning-making through art feels honest to the life he’s lived – bringing different worlds and histories together in the singular plane of a painting. It’s a process of learning how to see.
In 2021 Alvaro Barrington mounted
Spider the Pig, Pig the Spider at South London Gallery. A wide-ranging show of paintings in a salon hang reaching up to the high ceilings, it was the presentation of a whirlwind output. Following his graduation from an MFA at the Slade in 2017, Barrington has found himself at the centre of London’s art scene, with a burgeoning practice growing further afield.
The title Spider the Pig, Pig the Spider is indicative of the sheer breadth of cultural touchstones that Barrington brings into his orbit – from Peppa Pig to Louise Bourgeois’ spider sculptures. Conceived and...Subscribe to read this article in full
