Ricardo Barros is a photographer, writer, curator, and filmmaker. His works are in the permanent collections of eleven museums, including the Smithsonian Museum of American Art and the Museum of Art of São Paulo.

CURRENT: “An Entanglement of Space and Time” exhibition at ArtsWorcester November 14 – December 15, 2024. Artist’s talk on Saturday, December 7th at 11 AM.  (Click here to RSVP for artist’s talk, and click here for 5-minute video.)

In 2004 Barros published  Facing Sculpture:  A Portfolio of Portraits, Sculpture and Related Ideas, a book of portraiture that also addresses contemporary sculpture.  Magdalena Abakanowicz, one of the sculptors portrayed, wrote: “What a superb, unusual book! What a significant work of art … Thank you for this work beyond categories.” Barry Schwabsky wrote in the New York Times: “Each of these portraits has clearly been thought through differently — composed differently, lighted differently — reflecting the collaborative nature of his work with the sculptors Mr. Barros has chosen to portray … He seems to know that a certain degree of critical tension will give liveliness and complexity to his images, but he lets the tension remain a nuance.” Read full New York Times exhibition review here.

The 2012-2018 project, Riverside Silos, focuses on an industrial landscape. Referring to a set of enormous storage silos he photographed, Barros writes: “… the sheer geometry of these forms begs for a study of light, shadow and space.”

The 2013-2020 Figuring Space portfolio consists of photographs, an essay, and a companion video.  Using the figure, Barros explores space as a metaphor: “Until we encounter a boundary, space is completely invisible to us. We perceive space only when it ends,” he writes. Doug Wallack wrote about this project: “The images play with the tension between abstraction and context that space embodies — that tug between a sort of ideal Platonic form of space and space as we, embodied, experience it.” Read full review here.

Barros is currently working with 360-degree panoramas, exploring the idea that space can be folded and time reshaped to tell stories with a nonlinear narrative.

Ricardo Barros was awarded a Fellowship in Photography by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts in 1984 and 2021.

CURRENT EXHIBITIONS

“An Entanglement of Space and Time” at ArtsWorcester November 14 – December 15, 2024. Open Thursday – Sunday, 12 – 5, 44 Portland Street, Worcester MA 01608. (Click here for 5-minute video.)

Lauren Szumita, Director and Curator at Cantor Art Gallery, Holy Cross, will join me for an artist’s talk at 11 AM on December 7th at ArtsWorcester. An RSVP at https://artsworcester.org/events/ would be appreciated.)