Along with Douglas Huebler, Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth, Robert Barry is one of the founding artists of conceptual art. He has contributed to several major international events, including Documenta 5 (1972). After completing his studies at Hunter College of New York, following the teaching of Robert Motherwell, among others, Robert Barry began exhibiting his work in the mid-1960s.
Interested in the articulations between matter and the limits of our perceptual capacities, he stretched for example in 1968 nylon threads between several spaces and buildings. He then experimented with chemical or physical phenomenon, always at the boundaries of the visible, such as electromagnetic fields, inert gases, and ultrasonic electromagnetic frequencies (Inert Gas Series, 1969).
All of his work from the 1970s to the 1980s questioned the limits of perception while pushing back those of aesthetic form. Pursuing the pivotal principle of conceptual art according to which the idea of the work takes precedence over its material reality, he chose to intervene in a suggestive register by creating titles or announcements (for example, on the invitation cards to his exhibitions) likely to give rise to mental images in the viewer, which replace the direct images perceived in front of an object. Robert Barry will thus set up cognitive strategies close to telepathy. For several decades, he has been gradually refocusing his work on the mechanics of words, on the images they generate and the complex relationships they have with empirical reality. The result is Wall Pieces, imposing mural works sometimes on the edge of legibility.
