Long ago, visual artists were collectively the best at giving form and image to monsters—perceived or invented. After the 1940s—as surrealism morphed into pure abstraction—painters largely abandoned that job to Hollywood visionaries and video game designers. Those creators have indeed done a bang-up job of channeling our collective vision of what is grotesque into mutant beings, making an unforgettable and haunting communal shared image bank. Always grateful for the deformed faces they deliver—there is still something very special about the being Hannah Barrett conjures.

Barrett is one of the few artists—along with sculptor David Altmejd, painter TM Davy, Mernet Lawson and Peter Saul—who delight in giving facial features to our fantasies. Perhaps in the obdurately hard, slow process of creating beings in paint, Barrett’s characters conjure undefined and open-ended narratives. These assertive beings exist in a world without clear demarcations of gender, age, or any scripted roles.  They propose a non-binary future in which personas must me cultivated consciously.  Their fixed identities are only hinted at in her fantastical titles like The Connoisseur. 

These always well-dressed creations context an uncertain future to a romantic sized past, that hints at wealth coming out of a parodic world of privilege. They look down their prinz-nez adorned noses like a literature professor who makes sure you know they know more than you do on any given topic. Like actual human eccentrics they demand a certain acquiescence to their unique ways of being and in that they charm us into believing.