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The Landing is pleased to present I Sit by the Window, our second solo show of 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.

The result is a group of paintings with surfaces that are endlessly intriguing, endlessly compelling—works that celebrate a sense of mystery, while all the while maintaining it. These paintings, carefully constructed, display the intricacies of the process that built them. An artist’s exploration is underway, and made apparent, but the results of that exploration remain, at least partially, private.

The painter’s color palette has recently shown a shift; the jewel tones that predominated in her earlier works have been replaced by a prevalence of softened hues, like lavender, clay, peach, mint, ochre, sky blue, charcoal, tan and mauve. Baras credits that change to the time she spent in Marfa, Texas, for an artist’s residency at the Chinati Foundation. “The sandiness of the landscape and the light just really affected the way I see,” she says. “So it’s either nighttime palette or the muted sand tones. I’ve had a love affair with the desert for a long time, way before seeing it in Texas, but having an opportunity to work there and walk a lot made me somehow bend down to the earth—really see it.”

Baras’s artist statement explains the exhibition’s title, I Sit by the Window, which was inspired by a Joseph Brodsky poem of the same name. “I think about all the windows in my life… The window of our small wooden dacha faced no other neighbors, just forest, separated from us only by a field of sunflowers,” Baras writes, referencing her childhood in Russia; she emigrated to the U.S. in her teens. “Very little electricity, so once the sun went down, out of the window there was just thick, velvety darkness. These windows were very old and small, with wood solidly married by paint to glass; years could not be washed off, and there was an awareness that in the creases, there was dust from previous centuries… In all the places I have lived, there have been frames to look out into the world through. I was also thinking about the difference in light that comes in through these frames, and also the frame of the picture, which is a constant for me. I need it.”

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.