Dana Barnes
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Dana Barnes’ works can be found in acclaimed modern architectural spaces as well as private collections throughout the US, Western Europe, Scandinavia, Dubai and India. These include private residential commissions/installations created for various museum board trustee officers/ co-founders among other art collectors.
The studio’s work is regularly exhibited at major art and design venues around the world, including: The Armory Show, NY; Museum of Art and Design, NY; Museum of Craft and Design, SF ‘Raw Design’ Show; TEFAF, NY; Salon Art + Design, NY; FOG Design + Art, SF; Design Miami (Miami, Basel); R & Company’s ‘Woven Forms’ Show- Palazzo Benzon (Venice Biennale); R & Company’s and Glenn Adamson’s ‘Objects: USA’ Show, NY; Collective Design Fair, NY (featured artist 2013, 2015); Ralph Pucci International Gallery (solo show 2011; group shows 2012-current); among several other fairs/shows. Barnes has been featured in multiple media outlets, including: The New York Times; T Magazine Art Section; Architectural Digest; CULTURED; The Art Newspaper; Artnet News; as well as features in Rizzoli and Monacelli book publications.
Barnes creates textural and sculptural works, objects, and site-specific architectural installations that are made solely by hand. Every work embodies her deep fascination with materiality, process, and experimentation and comes to life in her Lower East Side New York studio where she devises her own methods and tools to produce the 3-dimensional forms, often of large-scale sculptural expression. Using innovative wet bonding processes, woolen and exotic fiber masses are contorted into a myriad of distortions and densities and fused with contrasting elements to form abstract compositions that elude convention and challenge the viewer’s preconceived notion of material and context. Barnes’ exploration of the duality of material manifests in her novel use of fibers melded with concrete, stone, copper, clay, enviropoxy, rubber, steel, glass and knotted antique Persian carpets as an infusion substrate. Whether informed by a material paradox or the gritty sensual beauty of natural forces, The artists’ work aspires to evoke a deep visceral and physical connection.
Barnes studied at Parsons and The New York Studio School on her way to a career designing for high-end fashion houses in NYC and Europe. During these formative years, she lived and traveled throughout the Indian subcontinent, Western and Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and Asia cultivating a deep awareness of textile and tactile forms. She founded Dana Barnes Studio in 2010 and today works from a turn-of-the-century former synagogue with a small team of artisans to hand make both small and large scale compositions. The organic and textural nature of Dana and her team’s work is inspired daily by the layers of history evident in the irregular stone, brick, wood, and steel materiality of the building.
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Works
Dana Barnes
FLUX (Held in Motion), 2026Merino wool, silk tussah, bamboo, enviro poxy and crystals180 H x 140 W x 20 D cm
70.8 H x 55.1 W x 7.8 D in
Approx. 35kgFurther images
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Description
FLUX (Held in Motion) articulates the extrusive flow traveling downslope—dark, ashen, broken “clinker” blocks carried along its rubbly surface—concealing what lies in its path as nature reasserts itself initiating the inevitable cycle of destruction, reclamation, and the birth of new formations. Barnes contorts fibers of Merino,Yak, Blue-faced Leicester, Camel, Gotland, Icelandic wool—fused with bamboo, silk and hemp—into a myriad of distortions and densities that yield an unconstrained dimensionality. Each abstract articulation is composed of multiple fibrous fragments created through hand-knotting and meticulous shearing techniques, then subjected to a boiling and bonding process before being configured into the larger amorphous structure. Informed by the ephemeral forces of nature and the mystifying, otherworldly landscapes encountered during Barnes’s research studies in Iceland, the sculptural mass works coalesce in tandem, celebrating the organic movement of textural form—solidified in time—an element that has become a signature of Barnes’s work. Just as it happens in nature—the destruction, the enshrouded darkness, the unexpected rupture, the emptiness and voids left behind without logic or order—there comes regeneration. Renewal emerges in altered form. In that compulsive growth Barnes recognises both nature’s persistence and our own human instinct to keep moving forward through pain, loss, and change. It is a reminder that even after upheaval, life insists on continuing and ultimately prevails. Barnes wanted the process of creating this work to unfold organically. She was drawn to the beauty that can emerge when control is loosened and the unexpected is allowed to take shape, much as it does spontaneously in nature. At its core, the work becomes an exploration of resilience—nature’s, and our own.2of 2Available Works
Click here to view all available works by Dana Barnes, or to contact the gallery to discuss a bespoke commission.
Exhibitions -
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