Critics’ Picks: Sophie Barber
Philomena Epps, Artforum
September 2021
All is full of love, as Björk once sang (on a track she likened to “birds coming out after a thunderstorm”). At Alison Jacques, Sophie Barber has populated the gallery with lovebirds, both literal and metaphorical. Her bright, bucolic presentation—accented by the tongue-twister title “How Much Love Can a Love Bird Love, Can a Love Bird Love a Love Bird” (a riff on the old faithful, “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck…”)—plays with scale, mixing canvases great and small. Barber’s thickly impastoed output has ranged from paintings the size and heft of a ship’s sail, hung taut with raw edges, to those as diminutive as a beach pebble, wadded into chunky shapes. […]