Alvaro Barrington valuation
London-based painter who works in yarn, burlap and reclaimed wood, with carnival, hibiscus and Grenada at the centre.
Alvaro Barrington was born in Caracas in 1983 to a Grenadian mother and a Haitian father, spent his early childhood in Grenada and moved to Brooklyn at eight.
What a work by Alvaro Barrington is worth
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Bio
Alvaro Barrington was born in Caracas in 1983 to a Grenadian mother and a Haitian father, spent his early childhood in Grenada and moved to Brooklyn at eight. He went to the LaGuardia High School in New York and to Hunter College, and in 2015 came to London to study at the Slade, finishing his MFA in 2017. He paints, and he also stitches yarn into burlap, sets canvases in frames of reclaimed wood and corrugated steel, and borrows from hip hop, Caribbean carnival and the painters he admires. Hibiscus flowers, yams, postcards and the figure of Marcus Garvey recur. His first solo exhibition, at MoMA PS1 in 2017, rebuilt his London studio inside the museum, and in 2019 he designed a float for the Notting Hill Carnival with the mas band United Colours of Mas. In 2024 he filled the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain with Grace, the year's Tate Britain Commission, a three-part installation on his childhood in Grenada, carnival and city life.
He works with several galleries at once, each showing a different strand of his work, among them Thaddaeus Ropac, Sadie Coles HQ and Emalin, so the gallery a work came from and its date place it within his output. The yarn and burlap works and the paintings in sculptural frames need care in handling and lighting, since textile fades and frames of salvaged material can shed or move. A record of the original exhibition, and the frame as it left the studio, matter more here than for an ordinary canvas.
Grenada, the Slade and the Duveen Galleries
In 2019 he curated Artists I Steal From with Julia Peyton-Jones, with works by Willem de Kooning, Cy Twombly and others hung beside one of his own. His Wave Your Flags exhibitions of 2021 painted hibiscus flowers in the colours of Caribbean national flags.
His first solo exhibition at a British public gallery was at the South London Gallery, and he was one of the painters in Mixing It Up: Painting Today at the Hayward Gallery in 2021.
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