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.

Rosa Goldmeier

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.

Rosa Goldmeier