Artist's Statement

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.