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 planned for early December. (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. Artist’s talk planned for early December. (Click here for 5-minute video.)