Fall Release 2025

“Beautiful World”

Paintings by Myra Barraza

In defiant intimacy, Myra Barraza’s recent paintings are charged with the friction of the present and the unstoppable momentum of living.

Taking its title from Devo’s 1981 chorus of ironic dissonance –It's a beautiful world, for you, not me– this series explores the concept of beauty whilst holding full knowledge of its complicity and inadequacy in the face of societal collapse.

The artist brings to this work a double consciousness forged in El Salvador’s civil war during the 1980s where she grew up: the uncanny coexistence of death and survival, tragedy and frivolity. This isn’t trauma aestheticised but metabolised –a sense of beauty that emerges through rather than despite violence. Her metamodern sensibility articulates both the critique (the awareness of inequality and suffering) and a genuine aesthetic exploration of beauty, without collapsing into either cynicism or naivete.

The epistolary gestures in titles such as ”Dear Vincent…” position the work in dialogue with art history whilst asserting something radically human. These aren’t homages but open letters written across time and distance, reaching towards artists who each negotiated their own relationships to beauty under duress. There’s a sense of loneliness here, but also an insistence on dialogue and the need for connection and community.

Crucially, Barraza’s works assert painting’s radical humanness against AI’s frictionless state. Where algorithms optimise, these paintings carry the weight of embodied experience, of physical mediation with materials and the exquisite evidence of time.

Devo may have foretold humanity’s devolution towards mechanisation, yet these paintings model what remains: the artist's capacity to hold despair and hope simultaneously, to make beauty from and about collapse, to continue the conversation precisely because it matters that we do. 

“Myra Barraza draws on scenes from everyday life to create deeply layered paintings that explore relationships between shape, form, and colour. Stripes partly conceal facial features, while opaque shapes dance on the edges of the canvases, forging a productive tension between figuration and abstraction. In some places, ghostly imagery from nature merges with elusive human faces or bodies, forming meditations on identity and our role within the world. Alluding to cultural and art historical references, Barraza’s paintings query how meaning is created and conveyed, interrogating the role of visual art as a coded language.”

ANNA SOUTER I London

Myra Barraza strikes again with a full home run in a new series of 17 oil paintings under the enigmatic title IYKYK.

The acronym for "If You Know You Know," widely used in social media, refers to insider knowledge or shared cultural references that might not be immediately apparent to all viewers, like a lovers' coded language or a tribal dialect. Pointing to the nature of meaning-making within art, Barraza quietly implies with this title her dissent from the entrapments of mass culture.

In this series of paintings, the artist continues to explore the tension between representation and abstraction. Full frontal portraits are layered over colorful vertical bands and round shapes; the human figure is pushed and pulled in size, pose, and angle; art historical references take a life of their own as in the "Dear Vincent" grouping; and, a distilled abstraction rules masterfully in the large-scale diptych "Mr & Mrs Blue Sky" or the smaller but intense painting "All Tomorrow's Parties."

"All my paintings are about the worlds I inhabit, by chance and choice," says Myra in a melodic Spanish accent about her artwork. "They take on a life of their own as they go out into the world."

Wittgenstein's language games, David Foster Wallace's metafiction, and David Salle's multi-referential imagery come to mind in the rich concoction that is Myra Barraza's creative vision.

For those seeking sensual pleasures or a lightness of being, the bravado brushwork, colorful interplay and shifting of forms deliver delicious painterly eye candy. For those with a finely tuned eye, there awaits a rich layering of intentions and the joyful fascination of elusive unequivocal meaning.

Fall Release 2024

“Night Swimming”

Paintings by Myra Barraza

“Night Swimming” is the title of a 90s R.E.M. crooner ballad and leitmotif for this year’s autumn painting harvest by Myra Barraza.

Exceeding all expectations in a dense flow of imagery based on vernacular photos, this collection of 15 oil paintings on canvas drifts from a lover's embrace, to rainy road-trips and sensual poolside narratives.

Enigmatic portraits surface in swift brushstrokes and tones of grey over layered stripes and saturated colourful backgrounds with playful balloon-like shapes, as if to surprise us. Abstraction retains its seductive power for Barraza in 2 small works of calm pale pinks and grey vertical bands over intense scenarios.

Here is the work of a mature artist coming in full force into her own voice, 30 years or so in the making. What a privilege it is to navigate through Myra’s work. Her rich exploratory past is here condensed and replenished, with echoes of previous series such as “Waters of Lethe”, “Predicament of the Subject”, “Coloratura” or “Feral Female”.

“Swimming at night is like wading in a cosmic ether, an otherworldly experience where everything seems at one”, says the artist, who grew up by the Pacific Ocean in her native El Salvador and moved to London 6 years ago.

In this memorable series, Barraza explores freely the flow of the subconscious, evoking dream-like states that speak powerfully of universal paradigms to the present moment.

Spring Release 2024

“The Jazz Messengers”

Paintings by Myra Barraza

Hear hear, a painter extraordinaire running loose and wild in London!

This is the first we’ve seen of Myra Barraza’s work since she moved at the end of last year into the artists residence program, run by Bow Arts, in South East London. She has been “free styling” her painting practice, as she calls it, while she gains her footing within a supportive arts community in her new studio space.

Drawn to jazz music and its improvisation ranges, she moves back and forth in her paintings with the ease and intensity of a caged panther. Overpainting past works, she recovers what seem like snapshots of familiar faces and expands fleetingly into small scale wild abstractions (think early Rothkos).

What does this selection of 16 works have in common, you may ask, besides their obvious vitality, joie de vivre and characteristic bravado brushwork? Look carefully and you will sense her dense layering of history and emotion, playfully encased in a theatre-like scenario meant to ease us into the complexity of what it means to be fully human.