Robert Barry

Robert Barry (born March 9, 1936 in the Bronx, New York) is an American conceptual artist.

Quotes

• I try to deal with things that maybe other people haven't thought about, emptiness, making a painting that isn't a painting. For years people have been concerned with what goes on inside the frame. Well maybe there is something going on outside the frame that could be considered an artistic idea.
  • Robert Barry (1968), cited in: Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. New York, Praeger, 1973, p. 40. p. xii

• Nothing seems to me the most potent thing in the world.
  • Robert Barry, cited in: Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. New York, Praeger, 1973, p. 40.

• My idea of painting was that those yellow squares, being put on the wall as delineating a virtual square or rectangle, were involving the wall itself within the piece and, in this sense, compared to what is usually a work of art, a painting, this piece was somehow reversing the usual terms of the esthetic proposition. Usually, you see the painting and you ignore the wall. Here you had the wall coming through the painting — and the painting itself, the painted pieces, become a standpoint to make the wall appear.
  • Robert Barry (1980) in: Alexander Alberro (2003). Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity. Alberro noted: "Barry has since discussed the way in which this painting accented the structural support..."

Quotes about Robert Barry

• Barry is part of a generation of artists that gave up traditional aesthetic methodologies in order to reappraise the meaning of art... His use of language, along with photography, and experiments with a range of other materials and media helped transform the way we look at and think about art today.
  • Anne Rorimer, cited in: Genocchio, Benjamin. "A Career Built on Exploring the Boundaries of Art", The New York Times, November 30, 2003

• Barry was one of the first to see that mass and volume in sculpture were not dependent upon visibility... But also, and perhaps more importantly, that language was a necessary component to communicate the idea in conceptual art.
  • Robert C. Morgan, cited in: Genocchio, Benjamin. "A Career Built on Exploring the Boundaries of Art", The New York Times, November 30, 2003