After two solo exhibitions in New York at White Columns in 2022 and Jack Hanley Gallery in 2023, Moon Grove presents Karen Barbour’s first solo show in the UK. Comprising twenty-nine paintings on paper that include a new body of work as well as paintings and collages that have been re-visited over the years, it dwells on the California-based artist’s intense concern for the spiritual in painting and how it might serve to alter psychological perspectives on landscape, cityscape or our internal relationship with our environment in general.

Essentially, Barbour’s work can be described as ‘visionary’, in one respect because her work is imaginative, direct and raw, and in another because she is inspired by her infrequent experience of temporal lobe seizures, a situation she describes as becoming ‘stricken with powerfully intense barrages of very accurate memories from my life’. On a wider cultural level her work is deeply connected and informed by US West Coast grass roots creative moments: the tradition of psychedelic illustration and pattern, self-taught artistic communities, and the Bay Area’s pioneering history of supported studios for artists with disabilities.

Links between these subjects and those in northern England reside in shared interests in music, local museum collections, approaches to painting and equally in artists making work in supported studios. With this connection in mind, Barbour has drawn reference to her fascination with artworks held in the seminal Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection at Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery, along with the many relationships that these works share with her own. Motifs and approaches include the depiction of strangely built structures, included in Dusan Kusmic’s towers, which communicate directly with Barbour’s own visionary buildings, Drago Jurak’s paintings of inventive monuments and a picture of a striped house by Frederic Vaudour. Irregular figures are also a concern for Barbour: Shafique Uddin’s pointillist portraits; Guillaume Pujolle’s dancing people; Aloise Corbaz’s colourful likenesses; as well as others works by Anna Zemankova, Michel Nedjar, Madge Gill and Valerie Potter.

Shafique Uddin perhaps provides one of the most prescient examples of style, simply because his ‘pointillist’ approach is echoed in Barbour’s technique of ‘dotifying’, a device she uses to provide an optical form of rapture alongside the artist’s interest in ‘binocular rivalry’, where perception alternates between different images presented to each eye. This process also forms a basic architecture for her painting onto which she build’s her Josef Hoffmann-style towers that suggest a hypnotic Hans Mesmer-esque representation of invisible substance.

A publication that documents this exhibition, spread over Moon Grove’s intimate, domestic gallery spaces, will follow in 2025. This will contain wider contextual information and biographical images, alongside an interview between Barbour and the curator and writer Simon Grant.

Karen Barbour (b. 1956), lives and works in Inverness, CA. She received a BA at UC Davis and an MFA in Film from San Francisco’s Art Institute. Barbour has worked as an author and an illustrator, and over the past twenty years her work has been included in exhibitions in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, among other places.

Moon Grove would like to acknowledge that ‘Where the Fruits of the Trees Are Jewels’ has been made possible with generous funding from Manchester Metropolitan University’s AHEAD fund.