Richard Barnes
Vita
Work by New York-based Photographer Richard Barnes has been shown in solo exhibitions at such institutions as the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Carpenter Center at Harvard University, Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum, and the University of Michigan Art Museum. His works can be found in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Barnes has lectured extensively, including at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, Parsons School of Art and Design in Manhattan, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He served as adjunct professor/visiting artist at the San Francisco Art Institute and has taught at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Barnes was a recipient of the Rome Prize 2005-2006 and his photographs of the cabin of Ted Kaczynski, aka the "Unabomber," were featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial and awarded the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Photography. He was the 2009 recipient of the Sidman Fellow for the Arts from the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan. In 2010 completed a residency from Lightwork/Syracuse University.
Übersehen
digital print on paper, 2023 (currently exhibited in the museum)
American photographer Richard Barnes was the 2023 Kranich Museum artist in residence. While exploring the landscape surrounding Hessenburg, Barnes discovered that hunting blinds, Hochsitze, Hochstände, marked the crossroads of his ongoing artistic interests into anthropology, archeology, architecture, and understandings of personhood that arrive through human relationships to nature and other species.
Unobtrusive elements, simple constructions in the landscape, hidden in the thicket, part of the forest or discreetly tucked away at its edges, and at the transition zones to large fields and wild meadows. Unnoticed and often overlooked, they define thresholds and boundaries. Barnes's camera does not overlook them, but looks at them, into them and out of them. Something uncanny emerges from these buildings. Associations of black box, watchtower, the hidden, the forbidden come to mind. Who might be waiting there? Their builders remain as anonymous as hunter and prey. Curious and mysterious, poetic and sensitive, Barnes' photographs draw the viewer into the field of tension between man-thing-nature.
As a collection of photographs, Übersehen shares Barnes’s distinctive artistic voice with the Kranich Museum’s audience. His consistency in these images allows the multiple voices of the unnamed builders of the constructions to become recognizable. German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher's images of waning American industrial sites echo backwards through Übersehen, as Barnes's American perceptions reflect upon this distinctly German subject. Barnes goes further in his series by considering the ways time reshapes these structures as they return to the landscape.
