HEDWIG BARRY



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Hedwig Barry (b.1969, Bloemfontein) is a Cape Town-based painter and sculptor. Through her work, she investigates the relationships between perception and intuition, using scale, density and colour to create visual worlds as rich in their outward associations as they are in their internal complexity.


Barry is deeply curious about the ethics of artistic practice, and how these extend beyond issues of representation to questions of care, responsibility, ecology, community and personal alignment. Her background as a producer and collaborator in the fields of art publishing and moving image inform her present thinking around the interconnectedness of communities of practice. Her work draws on the knots of relations that hold together societies, families and chosen communities, and searches for a visual language for these interdependencies.


Visually, Barry works in an abstract idiom that questions the classical delineation between foreground and background, or figure and ground. For her, all is at once ground and groundlessness. Her painterly surfaces evoke open fields and bodies of water, expansive and at times even bewildering. Inspired by Gertrude Stein’s notion of landscape dramaturgy, Barry proposes all-at-once surfaces that are not predetermined by particular subjects or representations. Rather, each work invites the viewer to stage their own perceptual ‘event’ in the action of looking.

In 2020 Barry completed an MA Fine Arts at the Wits School of Arts, and was commissioned to produce a body of large-scale outdoor sculptures of BMW’s South African headquarters in Midrand. She has also produced large-scale sculptures in public space, one of which, Crumple (Jeanette Schoon) (2021) is housed permanently in the collection of the Constitutional Court of South Africa.  Her work has been presented at the Nirox Sculpture Park, Constitution Hill, The KwaZulu Natal Society of the Arts, the AVA Gallery and at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair, amongst other venues. She will take up a Fellowship with the Ampersand Foundation in New York City in May 2026.



HEDWIG BARRY



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Hedwig Barry (b.1969, Bloemfontein) is a Cape Town-based painter and sculptor. Through her work, she investigates the relationships between perception and intuition, using scale, density and colour to create visual worlds as rich in their outward associations as they are in their internal complexity.

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Limited edition silk scarves
2022, 2025

My work has often explored and suggested movement, whether through sculptural structures or textured colour and brushstrokes. Through a collaboration with my daughter, industrial designer Maya Barry, fabric has become the surface across which these explorations run. Together we have produced a limited-edition range of four wearable artworks that communicate the original paintings’ spirit in silk.

The first iteration of limited-edition scarves were released in collaboration with curator Anthea Buys in 2022 then rereleased and added to in their current form and packaging by Maya in 2025. Applying her industrial design skills, Maya has considered what it means for a piece of art to transform into something wearable: the experience not just of viewing the piece and considering it from different angles and approaches, but also changing its form, continuously reshaping it, and even incorporating it into one’s own appearance and lived experience.

The scarves are available for sale for ZAR 3,500 per piece. For enquires, please contact Maya Barry at withmayabarry@gmail.com






Contour (2023) imagines a tracing of the topography of the Kalahari Desert: the dry, the hot, and the ancient. The work was made while reflecting on a time spent at Tswalu Kalahari Reserve as an artist-in-residence at the Tswalu Foundation.


Guide for Teaching (2019) is based on my sense of what it means to teach art classes to teenagers on the cusp of adulthood. In a space of teaching and learning, the process of becoming an adult mirrors a similar becoming – through creating – in the studio or art classroom.






Groundless I (2019) is a reflection on walking through my father’s garden, where fallen leaves and plant debris have created uneven terrain. Surface, form, and process translate the instability of ground itself; the physical site a metaphor for states of uncertainty.

Skin (2019) is about the body as a site of love and propulsion - and its continuous state of change, even as the pace of that change varies. This painting is part of a trilogy that included the works ‘Under Skin’ and ‘Skinned’, the originals of which have since been destroyed in a fire.