FRIEZE NEW YORK
Booth D5
Night Gallery is pleased to debut a solo presentation of new paintings by Los Angeles–based artist Hayley Barker at Frieze New York. On the heels of Barker’s major solo exhibition Permanent Green at chi k11 art museum in Shanghai, Frieze New York marks the artist’s return to the city for the first time since 2020.
Working from photographs that she transforms into large-scale sketches, Barker “draws” with oil paint, using small brushes across expansive linen canvases. Building colors that feel as atmospheric and layered as the landscapes she depicts, the artist prioritizes mood and memory over strict realism. For her Frieze New York presentation, Barker departs from the Californian flora and gardens that have long defined her work, turning instead toward the vast terrain of the American Southwest.
In the high desert of Abiquiú, New Mexico, Barker spent five days at a ranch, where she encountered an unexpected communion between landscape, animal consciousness, and the lineage of American painting. The journey followed a guided meditation with a local healer that left Barker with a vivid image of a dark horse standing in a nocturnal pasture. Seeking to understand this vision, she traveled east, arriving at a place she would later describe as the site of the most profound therapeutic encounter of her life. Just one exit away stood Georgia O’Keeffe’s former home and studio—proximity that felt both coincidental and quietly fated.
Barker’s solo booth for Frieze New York gathers landscape paintings born from this experience. Windows appear throughout the works as thresholds between interior contemplation and the immense solitude of the desert, its sweep of mesa and sky unfolding beyond the glass. Barker painted through the panes of O’Keeffe’s kitchen, a Santa Fe sauna, and the healing room of an adobe building at the ranch—each frame opening onto autumnal vistas of cottonwood, desert brush, and stone.
Working exclusively from her own photographs, Barker resists replication, allowing the paintings to unfold as meditations on presence, solitude, and interspecies awareness. Built through delicate layers of oil paint, the surfaces hold the elusive quality of desert light—neither fully representational nor abstract, but suspended between memory and observation. In these works, Barker’s attention to the local—whether the crooked framing of a screened-in window or a horse standing quietly in the New Mexican twilight—reveals her belief that even the most ordinary encounters can carry a quiet, spiritual depth.