HAYLEY BARKER
Frieze New York
Booth D5
Night Gallery is pleased to present 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 at chi k11 art museum in Shanghai, Frieze New York marks the artist’s return to the city for the first time since her two-person show at Shrine in 2022, The Spider.
Working from photographs that are then transformed into large-scale sketches, Barker “draws” with oil paint, using small brushes on large linen canvases. Building colors that are as ethereal and complex as the landscapes she depicts, the artist prioritizes mood and memory over strict realism. For her Frieze New York presentation, Barker deviates from the Californian flora and gardens she is known for and expands into the vast, dry earth of the American Southwest.
In the high desert of Abiquiú, New Mexico, Tewa Country, Hayley Barker spent five days at an equine therapy retreat, where she discovered an unexpected communion between landscape, animal consciousness, and the lineage of painting. There, Barker had a profound therapeutic encounter.
Barker’s solo booth for Frieze New York brings together landscape paintings born from this experience, where windows become thresholds between interior contemplation and the vast solitude of the desert, its silent sweep of mesa and sky. Barker paints the panes of Georgia O'Keeffe's kitchen, a Santa Fe sauna, and the cottonwoods at her retreat—each frame offering passage into autumnal vistas of changing cottonwood, desert brush, and stone. Among these works is a painting of the Tamarisk tree in O'Keeffe's garden, for which the elder artist had commissioned a sofa specifically positioned to gaze upon it. Also included in Barker’s presentation are paintings of Stella and Guapito, two horses with whom the artist shared deep communion. While known for her landscapes, Barker brings the same tender attention and care to her equine companions. Throughout the presentation, one can sense Barker’s empathy and emotional connection to the subjects of her paintings, from each plant and animal to the landscapes they inhabit.
The artist's delicately applied layers of oil paint build colors that honor the ethereal quality of desert light—neither purely representational nor abstracted, but hovering in a space between memory and observation. Working exclusively from her own photographs, Barker resists mere replication, instead allowing her paintings to become meditations on presence, solitude, and interspecies connection. Barker’s latest body of work is suffused with quiet revelation. Barker's reverence for the everyday—whether a necklace draped on a doorknob in Echo Park or a horse standing in New Mexican twilight—reveals her belief in the spiritual depth of humble encounters.