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The Landing is pleased to present Viewing Room: Yevgeniya Baras, which highlights six paintings by New York-based artist Yevgeniya Baras.

Baras embeds material within her paintings, which builds up the surfaces of her works in organic raised hills, creating picture planes that sometimes bring to mind swaths of land seen from above. Baras coats the materials she will embed—which include wood, paper pulp and yarn—in oil before she incorporates them into the internal workings of her paintings. She calls the process of building these unique, raised surfaces “drawing in relief.” Explains the artist, “I want the paintings to have a profile. I want three-dimensionality always.” The embedded materials sometimes include talismans of private significance to Baras: things she has collected or lived with. The energy of what’s included within the paintings is palpable, as is a sense of mystery.

These abstract canvases feature a visual language rife with symbolism—markings reference language, but without spelling anything overtly; shapes reference symbols, patterns bring to minds maps, and forms seem celestial—but interpretation is relegated to the subjective, and meaning is never overt. One senses something familiar, or perhaps glimpsed in dream: half-remembered, but not quite understood.

Yevgeniya Baras (b. Syzran, Russia, lives and works in New York, NY) received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019 and a Pollock Krasner Grant in 2018, and received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Emerging Artist Prize in 2014. She’s been awarded residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, Chinati Colony, the Bau Institute, the Surf Point Foundation and the Macedonia Institute. She teaches at RISD and Sarah Lawrence College.

Baras holds an MFA in painting and drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She also holds a BA in Fine Arts and Psychology—as well as an MS in Education—from the University of Pennsylvania.

She’s had solo shows at Harvey Fine Art Projects and Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in New York. Group exhibitions include shows at White Columns, Gavin Brown Enterprise, Sperone Westwater Gallery and Thomas Erben Gallery in New York and Susanne Hilberry Gallery in Detroit, among others. She’s a recipient of the Artadia Prize.