Karen Barbour: Brainwaves and Wavestorms at Harkawik gallery

Installation view, Karen Barbour: Brainwaves and Wavestorms, Harkawik, New York, Sept 5 - Oct 2, 2025. Courtesy Harkawik and the artist

By PIPER OLIVAS September 9, 2025

Harkawik gallery presents its latest exhibition, Karen Barbour: Brainwaves and Wavestorms. In this exhibition, Barbour moves fantastically between figuration and abstraction. Her subject matter ranges from gestural, tender portraits such as Daisy (2025) — depicting “the tendency for girls’ hair to become unruly” to more symbolic, less definable works such as Atomized Illumination (2025). On the surface, Barbour’s imagery is playful and whimsical, but the works also invite us to investigate how we see and interpret the world.

Born in San Francisco in 1956, Barbour now lives and works in Inverness, CA. In recent years, she has returned to canvases begun in the 1980s and 90s, using them as foundations for new pieces. Each painting develops through cycles of addition and erasure, leaving traces of earlier decisions embedded in the surface, such as Blue Heart Flower Amidst the Stalks (2025), which features dense layering through shapes and colors that peak through faintly. This rhythm, both deliberate and improvisational, creates works with visible histories. While some pieces may lean more ambiguous; many are informed by Barbour’s personal life, such as Donald C. Barbour (I’ll Never Get There Going Backwards) (2025), inspired by her late father’s fascination with California maps.

Donald C. Barbour (I’ll Never Get There Going Backwards), 2025. Oil on canvas, 72h x 73w inches. Courtesy Harkawik and the artist

Barbour’s work carries a kind of authentic magic: lively and childlike in color and form, yet carefully balanced in structure. Repetition Wilderness and Blue Starling (2025) draw the viewer in with dense, kaleidoscopic patterns. At first glance, the work appears as a grid of jewel-like squares, each alive with its own microcosm of patterns, hues, and texture. When viewing the work from further away, larger forms begin to emerge: stately flowers shooting up in bloom, and a bluebird that anchors the work. The paintings’ geometric structures provide stability, but are tempered by unpredictable color and organic forms. Barbour reflects on a period when “Repetition was a representational painting of a saintly figure with arms outstretched, and describes the bird that emerged after a long period of loving jury-rigging as “naughty.’”

Repetition Wilderness and Blue Starling, 2025. Oil on canvas, 68 x 50 inches. Courtesy Harkawik and the artist

Her abundant compositions reflect influences ranging from folk art and textile design to spiritual abstraction, while also nodding to modernist precedents such as Klimt’s ornament or Klee’s color grids. Yet Barbour’s approach feels entirely contemporary. Rather than offering a single, unified message, her paintings create atmospheres where meaning accumulates gradually through closer observation. Viewers can explore miniature worlds of marks and symbols or choose to take in the work as a whole. The effect is simultaneously meditative, energizing, and a reminder of how painting can hold multiple layers of meaning without forcing a singular resolution.

Karen Barbour: Brainwaves and Wavestorms is on view at Harkawik, New York, until Oct 2, 2025. WM