George Billis Gallery is pleased to present Either And Or: New Paintings, the gallery’s fourth solo show of Southern California artist Barbara Strasen.  The exhibition features the artist’s new works on Yupo and on canvas and continues through January 3rd.

Barbara Strasen’s work is about finding beauty and harmony in the turbulent complexity of apparently unrelated, contradictory images. Her perennial focus is on finding unexpected visual connections between seemingly unlike images and ideas, and in so doing, discovering new relationships between them. 

The sources of these images are wide-ranging: anthropology of nonwestern cultures, the biology of neural systems, pop culture, natural history, cosmology, and the Big Bang. Deftly manipulating layers of images as vastly different as teapots, birds, and landscapes in multiple media including acrylic, liquid graphite, and india ink, Strasen takes viewers on a journey of perception. In viewing, disparate images become juxtaposed, revealing a congruence and commonality between them.
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Strasen pushes the boundaries of painting, photography, printmaking, and mixed media to create multi-image works that reflect upon these layered complexities. Her original artistic medium was painting, which has expanded to include digital artworks, installations, and lenticular works. The result has been a variety of work, from gallery-sized paintings, prints and singular artworks to huge installations for a building lobby and an airport terminal.

Since graduating from UC Berkeley, Strasen has taught at the UC San Diego, exhibited extensively in museums and galleries in Europe and USA, curated exhibitions and executed numerous public commissions including her 2016 solo exhibition at the Long Beach Museum of Art. Her work has been featured at Archeus Fine Art, London; Ambrosino Gallery, Miami, FL; Discovery Museum, Bridgeport, CT; Islip Art Museum, Islip, NY; Jaggedart, London; Galerie Neue Anstandigkeit, Berlin; Budapest Galerie, Budapest; Galerie Soloblu, Milan; Grey Art Gallery, NYU, New York; Het Apollohuis, Eindhoven, NL; P.S. 1, New York; Colburn School Of Music, Los Angeles; Pfizer Corporation, Walton Oaks and Sandwich, UK; Whitney Museum Of Art, New York; Santa Barbara Museum Of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; Rutgers Art Gallery, Rutgers, NJ; TwoTen Gallery of the Wellcome Trust, London; Steirischer Herbst, Graz, Austria; Flash Art Museum, Trevi, Italy; Fischer Art Gallery, USC, Los Angeles; Wolfson Art Gallery, Miami-Dade College, Miami; Gutenberg Pavillion, Mainz, Germany; Loyola Marymount Unversity, Los Angeles; Austin Art Museum, Austin, TX; Center For Life Sciences, Newcastle, UK; Galeria Palacio, Porto, Portugal.