Colleen Barry’s New Paintings Ask What It Means to Trust an Image
At Half Gallery in New York, Colleen Barry (b. 1981) is presenting 14 recent paintings that move between motherhood, ancient mythology, and the uneasy status of images in the age of A.I. The exhibition, “Iconophilia,” gathers works that draw on the Capitoline Wolf, Janus, and other classical figures while remaining rooted in the intimate textures of contemporary life.
Barry’s starting point is not technological panic, but a quieter shift in how images are received. Over the past few years, she has watched her school-age children grow increasingly suspicious of photographs, often identifying them as A.I. on sight. Barry says she does not consider herself an A.I. doomsayer — she uses ChatGPT in her own daily routine — yet she sees that reflexive distrust as part of a much older cultural pattern: iconoclasm, or the fear and rejection of images.
Her response is iconophilia, the love of images. In works such as “Janus Novus” and “Aegis,” Barry places unexpected forms side by side, building compositions that feel both ceremonial and unsettled. A Grace Jones head hovers above the two-faced Roman god Janus in one painting; in another, a hunched nude body shares the canvas with a jade lion. The effect is not narrative in any conventional sense. Barry has said she wants the paintings to generate “pictorial delight” rather than impose a strict story.
That openness is central to the exhibition. Barry’s images are carefully constructed, but they resist closure. They invite the viewer to linger over the friction between tenderness and authority, the ancient and the immediate, the sacred and the everyday.
Barry’s biography helps explain that tension. She grew up on the Lower East Side in a working-class family, the daughter of a nurse and a professional painter and wallpaper hanger. Her father’s jobs took her into luxury apartments uptown, where she encountered a world of beauty that felt both distant and tangible. Later, after her stepfather took a position at Dwight School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Barry attended the school herself and began dating Julian Casablancas, who would go on to form The Strokes.
It was Casablancas’s stepfather, the Ghanaian artist Sam Adoquei, who gave Barry her first serious painting education. He taught her on nights and weekends using rigorous academic methods grounded in the Old Masters, a foundation that still shapes her work. Barry has also cited the figurative turn in contemporary painting — including the work of Jenna Gribbon, Salman Toor, and Doron Langberg — as a sign that she could enter a conversation she once thought was closed to her.
In “Iconophilia,” that conversation becomes especially pointed. Barry is not rejecting the image; she is testing how much belief it can still hold.
