Karen Barbour: Slightly mysterious, yet content

Contributed by Angelica Maria Fuentes / California-based Karen Barbour, whose solo exhibition “Diamond Garden for Cornelia” is now up at Harkawik Gallery, has a compelling sense of narrative flow. She paints surrounded by her work, often moving from canvas to canvas to incorporate recurring motifs – florets, butterflies, and birds – as well as refine color, texture, and line. She began the Man and Bird in Landscape with Lanterns in the 1980s and completed it this year. Layered grids of meticulous patterns, shapes, and bodies reflect her patient, protracted process. Barbour’s choices of image are bold and playful, drawing especially on Abstract Impressionism. Flowering in Sufficient Abundance / Body Structure, in which totems, vines, and small figures dance blissfully, radiates modernist energy while being firmly contemporary.

Barbour’s family is present in her work. The exhibition features two portraits of her daughter Daisy and one of an uncle and aunt. In one image, Daisy, a frequent subject, is vibrantly rendered in green hues; in the other, she is opalescent, holding Earl the cat. Uncle Budge and Auntie Elza originated from a drawing the artist, now 70, made in a sketchbook at age six, and provides an intimate look into her early life. Uncle Budge wears a coat covered with Barbour’s signature overlapping organic forms. The shadowy figures pulse against a dark textured background, luminescent, slightly mysterious, yet content.

It’s a tradition in Barbour’s family for a woman named Cornelia to pass her name on to a second daughter. In this context, both the show and the title piece Diamond Garden for Cornelia are at once refreshing and nostalgic, tender tributes to generations of Cornelias. Overall, the exhibition handsomely demonstrates that everyday life can draw from the past, embrace ongoing change, and nourish the patient, existentially informed evolution of art. And it reflects Barbour’s dedication to that kind of life.

“Karen Barbour: Diamond Garden for Cornelia,” Harkawik Gallery, 88 Walker Street, New York, NY. Through December 19, 2026.

About the author: Angelica Maria Fuentes is a curator, art historian, writer, and artist based in Brooklyn and has held curatorial, administrative, and programming roles in organizations including The New York Art Residency & Studios (NARS) Foundation, The New Children’s Museum, New York Art Conservation, The Queens Museum, VIA Art Fund, New York Artists Equity Association, Equity Gallery, and the American Federation of Arts.