Summer Release 2026
“Les Fleurs”
New works by Myra Barraza
Les Fleurs marks a joyous return for Myra Barraza — not to a prior moment, but to the full breadth of her rich creative practice. After years of sustained focus on painting, Barraza steps back into the wider expanse of her long artistic life, returning to sculpture, drawing, and video alongside the canvas. The result is a group of works that reveal her creative complexity and showcases her affinities with the cross-medium restlessness of artists such as Sterling Ruby, with the same insistence that painting, sculpture and object-making are not separate disciplines but a single, continuous act of artistic inquiry.
Myra Barraza’s studio is located within Thamesmead, a Brutalist estate in South East London that was built in the 1960s as a vision of the city of the future — an ideal city, green, communal and forward-looking. The Bow Arts' live-work programme of which she’s part is an extension of an urban development plan by Peabody, in a community that is today home to migrant families, working people and artists. “I live in the city of tomorrow, today”, she says in her soft Spanish accent with all the implied contradictions.
Barraza’s Les Fleurs paintings continue her sustained conversation with art history — not as homage, but as correspondence. In works such as Dear Cy Twombly… and Dear Brancusi…, Barraza paints from the artists' own photographs of flower vases — private, domestic images. To paint from these photographs is to enter twice through that threshold — as the artist who originally registered the flowers and as the painter who looks back at the record of that gesture, across time. Her choice of colour over vertical bands in the background gives these works an almost dream-like quality.
Dear Matisse… (French Ultramarine) occupies a different register within this series. Its starting point is not a vase but the large Monstera plant that appears repeatedly in photographs of Matisse's studio — a presence so constant it seems less like décor than a collaborator. Here the domestic space and the creative space are one and the same. The plant becomes a metaphor for the creative act itself: something rooted and yet always reaching, continuously unfolding beyond its own edges. To paint it is to think about what it means to make, and to make, and to keep making — a question Barraza has long been asking.
I am Vertical (Dear Sylvia Plath…) is, before anything else, a painting: an intense vertical field of fuchsia, red and violet, without figurative imagery, though traces of forms move beneath the surface. Only when the title came did the correspondence reveal itself — Plath's poem, with its longing to surrender the upright, conscious self into roots and the quiet permanence of nature’s cycles.
Barraza uses a chromatic language that is entirely her own. Her palette is dense and unapologetic — blues of an almost underwater intensity, reds and ochres that seem to hold the memory of earth and heat, pinks that tip between tenderness and exhilaration. It is a sensual and at times mysterious use of colour, shaped by a lifetime of looking and by her visual Latin American inheritance: the charged earth tones of pre-Columbian textiles, the bold chromatic planes of Luis Barragán's architecture, where pigment becomes something almost tactile.
In two of these layered works under the title “Funiculì, Funiculà ”, image and stripe become fully entangled, neither subordinate; the picture plane itself is a site of negotiation between order and dissolution. Other small square canvases introduce a more intimate register — loose in touch, figurative forms emerging from striped grounds with the directness of a sketch and the authority of a completed thought. One of these, Flower Moon, is composed of five interchangeable pieces, inviting a playful rearrangement of parts and meaning.
Alongside the paintings, three works on metallic paper occupy their own quiet territory. These are drawings in the fullest sense: marks incised directly into the surface, creating low reliefs that catch the light differently depending on where the viewer stands. Geometric circles traced with spirographs coexist with loose, intuitive mark-making, the metallic ground lending both a luminous, shifting quality. Titled after David Bowie's song Wild is the Wind, they recall an atomic world of seeds released joyfully into a spring breeze.
The seven Sunshine Wands and Walking Sticks ask something different, and offer perhaps the exhibition's most direct gesture of love toward the natural world. Made from fallen branches gathered from the streets around her studio, they carry the record of their own time: knots, curves and the memory of weight and weather. Made at a time when the artist was recovering from an ankle fissure, each has been sanded and pared down, its bark selectively removed to reveal the wood beneath, then wound in silk ribbons in colour combinations that are part healing ceremony, part celebration. They stand between sculpture and ritual objects and recall the dimension of Joseph Beuys's arts practice and his conviction that natural materials carry memory and transformative power.
A group of short video works, filmed locally and titled Tree Portraits, completes the exhibition. Each piece presents a single tree from a fixed viewpoint — full length, unhurried visions of a gentle presence swaying in the wind. The tree as subject or persona, as a quiet demonstration of rootedness and movement at the same time. Together they form the exhibition's most unguarded gesture of nature observed.
“Inside every man lives the seed of a flower / if he looks within he finds beauty and power.” Minnie Riperton's 1970 song does not describe a flower — it announces one as a declaration of hope. The flower as archetype, carries something essential about what it means to unfold and grow, to reach toward light. Carl Jung, in his celebrated commentary on the ancient Taoist text The Secret of the Golden Flower, encountered the same image from a different direction: the golden flower as a symbol of individuation, — a seed from which, through inner fire and patient attention, something luminous and whole emerges. It is in this spirit that Myra Barraza gathers this group of artworks under the title Les Fleurs, to celebrate nature in its ongoing vitality and promise of life as self-fulfilment.