Barry Ginder: Erasure and Accumulation

ViewEast no101, no102, 2024, Acrylic on plexiglass, 42x84 inches (each panel)

By VICTOR SLEDGE February 19, 2026

Architecture is an art in and of itself, but most architects don’t double as a painter as well. However, after receiving training in classes at Temple University, that’s exactly how Barry Ginder’s career developed. 

“During my time as an architecture student, I also took courses in painting,” Ginder says. “It was really at that moment they both became these creative endeavors to document what I see in the world.”

From his abstract, geometrically-informed paintings, it’s clear that Ginder is an artist who is as equally influenced by his training as an architect as he is his training as a painter. His current practice turns the urban environments many of us are familiar with into new planes of perspective, where depth becomes something observable and emotive. 

Ginder primarily works with cityscapes in the mid-Atlantic region, specifically Philadelphia. He has a certain eye as an architect that allows him to translate the city in a way that most don’t, creating something both familiar to our experiences while also reorienting them 

“As architects, we get trained to visually monitor our surroundings, and, almost like a detective,  figure out the process of making things,” he explains. 

View East no61, 2023, Acrylic on plexiglass, 12 x 12 in

It’s not that the average citydweller can’t appreciate the form of an urban environment and how it’s made. It’s more that, as an architect, someone like Ginder finds the angles, lines, and structures that make up that form. That’s what we see in his work as a painter. 

His process starts by observing the city—its dimensions, dynamics and features— and either sketching or photographing it as a reference. He has a persistent, routine to the way he works that produces the abstracted yet keenly representational pieces we see in his catalogue. 

“I am not starting a painting without a reference point. The rigor in having something to work from and drawing out the essential qualities and characteristics is what I’m interested in,” he says.

It’s a discipline that breeds consistency. And that discipline continues from the point of capturing that reference to starting the painting, because from his technique to his use of color, Ginder is meticulous and niche in the way he approaches a piece. To begin, he works with plexiglass, which he sands to create a more textured surface to work on. These textures no doubt draw from his architectural background, but they also provide the paintings a faint luminosity, as if we are stepping into hazy environments full of mystery and possibility.

View East no100, 2024, Acrylic on plexiglass, 42 x 42 in

As the painting process begins, there continues to be this architectural, almost scientific confluence of artistic technical choices that build his signature style. He works with a limited palette, but as he layers, sands, and otherwise manipulates the colors he uses, Ginder creates pigments of varying hues and strengths that often feel like the kaleidoscope of color you see across a city. 

At the same time, Ginder takes the creative liberty to extrapolate the pigments as he sees fit in the practice of turning a reference into a piece of art. The colors he begins a piece with may be simple, but the way in which he uses them is anything but. 

He says, “If you look at the paintings, and then look at the original photographs, the color is not the same. There’s a moment in the painting where it transforms from the representation found in the photograph to something much further away from that.”

Adding to the complexity of his paintings, Ginder also plays with line work. Not all of his lines are harsh and clean, but that’s intentional. Some lines are crisp, while others a gestural, a tug-of-war between opacity and translucence, between observed reality and abstracted emotion, a “harmony,” as he describes it. 

His allowance for hard and soft, bright and dull, all add to what eventually becomes his honest interpretation of the cities he paints.

“In terms of precision, when I look at a cityscape, not everything aligns. There’s always that juxtaposition that’s apparent in our lived world,” he explains.

So when it’s said and done with any given piece, through this intricate practice, he lands on paintings that are a step away from, but still in conversation with, the cityscape itself.

View East no6, 2025, Acrylic on plexiglass, 24 x 24 in

“The process of sanding the plexiglass, the process of putting lines and forms down and then continually working through the process of editing that (sometimes I sand in between to remove material), it’s a layering of information that starts with a photograph that eventually becomes more about image and painting itself,” he says.

What you find in Ginder’s work is his style and process becomes as much of the focal point as is the work itself. So where does that integrity to these salient aspects of his practice come from? For Ginder, it seems to be the respect and reverence for his training, but also from the artists he’s seen throughout his own growth as a painter.

Oftentimes, the most self-realized artists are also lifelong students. They are creatives who know their inspirations, study them, and use that work to better understand and incubate their own. And Ginder is no different.

Ginder cites Irish painter Sean Scully and German painter Gerhard Richter as two of his personal favorite artists. Both are painters with an immovable dedication to their own style and technique. Artists who grow and evolve, of course, but the DNA of their craft deepens further and further. 

It's this marriage and commitment to craft that most connects Ginder to painters of this nature. Though they may be imitated, and while derivatives of Scully or Richter’s work may grow by the day, to Ginder, it’s the fingerprint of their technique and craft, the same that he’s put on his own work, that ensures those works can never be fully duplicated.

View East no2, 2025, Acrylic on plexiglass, 12 x 12 in

“There’s something just a bit more. Just a bit unique. I learned from these painters that I don’t want to replicate someone else’s style. I want to create my own.”

Sure enough, that style is unmistakable in his pieces. Even in Ginder’s earlier works, there are differences from the work audiences may most expect to see from him today, but the crux of that work remains the same: rooted in the interplay between erasure and accumulation.

“The earlier work was much more inclined to be a closer interpretation of the photographs I was working with,” he explains. “But I was still trying to find the essence and quality of the place.”

Even now as his work has grown more into abstraction, there is still a certain attention to the identity of the cityscapes, still an evolution of craft that remains particular and paramount to who he is as an artist that speaks to the practice he’s built. 

“I’m finally getting to the point where I have created a unique way of representing my paintings. I felt like I wanted to push that envelope a little bit further and see what the opportunities were,” he says.

If you want to learn more about Ginder and his work, you can visit his website here and follow him on Instagram @barryginder