Yevgeniya Baras

Inspired by touch and the transformative nature of materials that layer and decompose, Yevgeniya Baras creates paintings and sculptures that investigate bodily themes and natural phenomena such as weather, mountains, and planets. Baras, who works simultaneously on up to seven pieces at once, describes her paintings as “slowly cooked objects” because of her dedication to process. Through her labor, Baras

plays the roles of painter, nurturer, and mother. Baras views her paintings as an extension of her body, with the canvas evoking the body and the paint functioning as skin, scars, and orifices. Baras's deployment of thickly reworked paint, needlework, embroidery, and layering of tire rubber, stone, and wood creates saturated abstractions that mirror microscopic interpretations of the body. By covering her canvases from front to back, Baras stresses the three-dimensionality of her work.

Baras has held solo exhibitions at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in New York, One River Gallery in Englewood, New Jersey, Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects in New York, GrizzleyGizzley in Philadelphia, and Contemporary Art Workshop in Chicago. In addition, Baras has contributed to several group exhibitions, including at galleries such as Western Exhibitions in Chicago, Mass Gallery in Austin, Galerie Kornfeld in Berlin, The Pit in Los Angeles, and Outpost Gallery in Brooklyn. In 2017, Baras held a residency at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York and in 2015 was the Artadia Award Recipient in New York. Baras is involved in a curatorial projects at Regina Rex Gallery in the New York's Lower East Side and in 2011 co-founded Bull and Ram, also in New York.