page_title: Phyllida Barlow
section_title: Work
hierarchical_section_title: Phyllida Barlow / Work
caption_attribution_description: English: Picture of part of installation "dock" (2014) by Phyllida Barlow at Tate Britain.
context_page_description: Phyllida Barlow CBE RA is a British artist. Barlow studied at Chelsea College of Art and the Slade School of Art. After joining the staff in the late 1960s, Barlow taught at the Slade School of Art for more than forty years before retiring in 2009 and is now Emerita Professor of Fine Art. Phyllida Barlow has had an important influence on younger generations of artists through her work and long teaching career in London art schools. At the Slade School of Fine Art, her students included Turner Prize-winning and nominated artists Rachel Whiteread and Angela de la Cruz. In 2011 Barlow became a Royal Academician and in 2015 she was made a CBE for her services to the arts in the Queen's New Year Honours. In 2017, Barlow represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale.
context_section_description: Barlow's work is a combination of playful and intimidating. The child like colours she paints her sculptures, almost referencing toys is deeply contrasted with the industrial materials and scale of her works. Her sculptures tower above the viewer as if a huge section of scaffolding. She plays with mass, scale, volume and height which creates a tension to her forms. Her forms give the impression of being both excruciatingly heavy and light as air simultaneously. When in the presence of her sculpture, one looses the sense of object and is entered into an environment. Barlow does not hide her process and material choices from the viewer, she exposes each detail.
  Best known for her colossal sculptural projects, Barlow uses "a distinctive vocabulary of inexpensive materials such as plywood, cardboard, plaster, cement, fabric and paint" to create striking sculptures. Drawing on memories of familiar objects from her surroundings, Barlow's practice is grounded in an anti-monumental tradition characterised by her physical experience of handling materials, which she transforms through processes of layering, accumulation and juxtaposition. "Obtrusive and invasive, Barlow's large-scale sculptural objects are frequently arranged in complex installations in which mass and volume seem to be at odds with the space around them. Their role is restless and unpredictable: they block, interrupt, intervene, straddle and perch, both dictating and challenging the experience of viewing." Her constructions are often crudely painted in industrial or synthetic colours, resulting in abstract, seemingly unstable forms.
  Maybe I don't think enough about beauty in my work because I'm so curious about other qualities, abstract qualities of time, weight, balance, rhythm; collapse and fatigue versus the more upright dynamic notions of maybe posture ... the state that something might be in. Is it growing or shrinking, is it going up or down, is it folding or unfolding? – Phyllida Barlow, The Guardian 2016.
  Barlow was also a prolific painter, yet even in this field she recognized they were "sculptural drawings". She painted as part of her curriculum at the Chelsea College of Arts - where she was encouraged to practice by artist and sculptor Henry Moore - and carried on doing so throughout her life as an artist, accruing a vast archive of work.
  She also has featured in the following publications: Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947 – 2016 by Paul Schimmel and Jenni Sorkin , Phyllida Barlow: Fifty Years of Drawings by Sara Harrison, and Phyllida Barlow: Sculpture 1963 – 2015 by Fiona Bradley.
caption: Dock by Phyllida Barlow at Tate Britain in 2014
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