ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Daniel Barber is an artist who has exhibited his work nationally and internationally in solo and group exhibitions. Born in Erie, Pennsylvania, he moved annually as a child until finally settling in Chicago where he spent many years painting and teaching. He currently teaches painting and drawing at The University of Georgia in Athens (UGA) and in the UGA program in Cortona, Italy. He also lectures in art history and contemporary theory as well as leads international study trips (in Europe and Asia) for The Art Institute of Chicago. In his paintings and drawings he has a profound interest in the human body – and its relationship to its environment – as an expressive and ontologically investigative vehicle.

He has a deep understanding of the history and theory of color and light in painting (physically, symbolically, and expressionistically) and the relationship of art and science through an examination of pigments and the human visual system. He is also concerned with painting as embodied experience—phenomenological and ontological/existential—and the painting medium as a kind of mediator between conscious knowledge (technical, historical, and scientific) and the Unconscious (painting as fugue-state or reverie).

Nature – the beauty and complex mystery of a lived ecosystem – has been particularly evident in the paintings since his relocation from a very urban loft in Chicago to a Victorian farmhouse on wooded land in rural Georgia. The inhabitants of this quiet place not only creep into his barn/studio but into the painted imagery as well. In these curious times of environmental change, he seeks to investigate ever more deeply the interconnectedness of the human and non-human, the organic and inorganic, and the delicate and weighty responsibilities of each participant.