Instagram: @harrybarker_art

 

I’m a Postmodernist, Neoclassical painter who often works with the monochromatic. The visual context of my work shares affinities with art from the Renaissance whilst seamlessly adding a contemporary twist. To this end my paintings run closely with the ideology of human form and beauty from the 16th century whilst installing a very different and radical approach much closer to the likes of The Chapman Brothers. I relish in collaging beautiful images of sculpture, super models and pop culture’s icons to create a hybrid. That talks to the postmodernists simulacrum that everything had already been done; all that remains is for us to take fragments of what is to hand and combine and reconstitute them in ways that are meaningful. 

 

I take inspiration from the English tradition of impurity, we had an empire, we were forever stealing ideas from other places and collaging them together. Take London for example, you have parts that are pre The Fire of London that have survived, right next to Christopher Wren’s St Pauls Cathedral which is situated near Renzo Piano’s Shard. Then you get an old derelict building that finally gets demolished to bring forth a Westfield shopping mall and all of these things coexist, the old and the new in a melting pot of cultures.