Barbara Prey

Barbara Prey Projects is pleased to present three upcoming summer exhibitions of recent work by internationally acclaimed artist Barbara Ernst Prey.

BARBARA ERNST PREY: New Oil Paintings and Prints July 1 – July 14

INFLECTION POINTS 40 Years Painting Maine July 15 -Sept 4
MASS MoCA: Studies from a Museum Commission August 15 – Sept 20

Barbara Ernst Prey: New Oil Paintings and Prints

The summer 2017 inaugural exhibition at Barbara Prey Projects will feature recent small-scale oil paintings along with a new series of limited edition prints. While Prey is mostly known as a watercolorist, the artist has recently returned to the medium in which she first began her instruction; the size of the panels and nature of the oil medium enabled Prey to experiment with levels of freedom and informality not afforded by watercolor. The exhibition will debut the paintings of nearby Seavy Island as well as new works from the artist’s Village View series in conjunction with recent digital prints of select drawings.

Inflection Points: 40 Years Painting Maine

An American painter with international reputation, Barbara Prey has been maintaining a studio and painting in Maine for over 40 years. The northeastern state has a long tradition in the history of American landscape painting, thinking of artists such as Hopper, Church, Homer, Wyeth—but few, if any, are women.
Over the many years of painting in Maine, Prey built a close and longstanding relationship with the local fishing community, which is fundamental to her subject matter.
Prey mostly works on site ‘en plein air’ and was always drawn to the unique landscape of Maine, examining and implementing her surroundings through the visual language of landscape painting. The exhibition is a synthesis of Barbara Prey’s dialogue with her immediate environs in the Port Clyde, ME area and her observations on the same location’s evolution over the course of 40 years.
40 Years Paining Maine further explores the strong watercolor tradition in Maine and with a woman painter, revising the male dominated art-historical tradition.

MASS MoCA. Studies from a Museum Commission

The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) has commissioned Barbara Ernst Prey to paint a groundbreaking monumental watercolor for their new Building 6 that opened its doors to the public at the end of May 2017.
Barbara Prey’s massive interior portrait of MASS MoCA’s 120,000 square foot Building 6 depicts part of the historic mill in its raw, un-renovated state, just prior to the beginning of the construction work. Measuring 8 feet tall by 15 feet wide, the painting is monumental by any standard, but for a watercolor on paper—perhaps the most unforgiving combination of any painterly media—the undertaking is truly breathtaking as it stretches the medium in new and exciting ways. The monumental scale of Prey’s project broke boundaries and opened up new ideas and concepts within the artist’s own practice; the project was a technical tour de force, requiring specially made papers, mounts, frames as well as an extra large studio space to paint.
As an artist that works mainly on site, Prey spent countless hours in the space at MASS MoCA, looking, distilling and thinking about the architecture; as the concept developed, she started working on preliminary drawings during her visits. The studies began small and in pencil to accurately capture the architecture and overall composition; Prey then moved to color and larger formats, working out the light and the complex colors.
The drawings displayed in this exhibition serve as references for the final painting and uniquely chronicle the development of Barbara Prey’s commission for MASS MoCA.

For more information visit www.barbarapreyprojects.com