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