An American artist born in 1936, Robert Barry became one of the most radical representatives of conceptual art in the sixties. During the seventies, his artwork became almost exclusively text-based. He projected words onto walls, in a series of slides presenting isolated phrases or enunciations with ambiguous meanings. Since then, his use of words has become more sweeping, with the reintroduction of pictorial principles he used when a student at Hunter College in New York. His monochromatic backgrounds open an infinite space in which the words float freely in an attempt, a successful one, to reinterpret, using different methods, the modernist principles of Soviet suprematism.
