Articles and Essays
Pinacotheca, Sol LeWitt, and the Freedom of the Idea
By Dr. Irene Barberis 19/06/2026
Founded by Bruce Pollard in St Kilda in 1967, Pinacotheca quickly became one of the most important sites for contemporary and experimental art in Australia. In 1970 it relocated to a large former shoe factory in Richmond, where its vast industrial spaces provided selected artists with opportunities to test new ideas beyond the conventions of the traditional, painting and sculpture. During the 1970s Pinacotheca emerged as
one of Australia's most important galleries for conceptual, post-object, and systems-based practices. Artists including Robert Hunter, Simon Klose, Jonas Balsaitis, Dale Hickey, Rollin Schlicht, William Anderson, Mike Parr, and others, were engaged in sustained investigations of perception, structure, seriality, process, language, and one may say, the dematerialisation of the art object...... Read more
Back and Forth
by Wilma Tabacco, exhibition catalogue essay for The Tapestry of Light, 2018
'The prophetic visions of St. John, evocatively described in the biblical text Revelation/Apocalypse have, throughout centuries, inspired many artists and illustrators to produce visual representations of the textual narratives...' Read more
Crossing the Line 3: Global Drawing
Studio International
Janet McKenzie, published 18/12/2015
'Florence was the venue for the third of the Crossing the Line conferences, which explore the role of the artist in society. It also included two exhibitions, one of contemporary Australian drawing and another of drawings gathered from around the world...' Read more
Crossing the Line 2: Drawing in the Middle East
Studio International
Janet McKenzie, published 06/10/2014
'Crossing the line was a conference that brought together specialists to examine the role of drawing in the Middle East with the aim of breaking down the cultural barriers to personal expression....' Read more
The Drawn Word
Studio International
book review, published 07/03/2014
'The drawn word is the product of a research project funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council networking grant that explored the relationship between writing, drawing and literacy. As such it is a collaborative publication between Studio International, the University of the Arts London (UAL) and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University (RMIT)...' Read more
Irene Barberis: Apocalypse/Revelation: Re Looking (Feminale: the edge of logic, intersecting luminosities)
Studio International
Dr Janet McKenzie, exhibition review, published 16/01/2013
'Irene Barberis has been inspired by and explored imagery for her art and research into the Book of the Apocalypse since 1984, exhibiting widely in Australia and abroad...' Read more
Portraiture in Focus: Irene Barberis, Anita Taylor and Helen Sturgess
Studio International
Dr Janet McKenzie, exhibition review, published 31/03/2013
To focus on the portrayal of the human form in the 21st century; specifically the portrait requires a traverse of multifarious philosophical shifts, and, of stylistic movements from the past 150 years....' read more
Edge of Logic, interview with Irene Barberis
Langford 120
by Virginia Fraser, for the exhibition Apocalypse Revelation: Re Looking, 2012
'A lot of the Biblical book of Revelation has gone into Irene Barberis and a lot has come out again. It has inflected her aesthetic and philosophical life for nearly thrity years and since the mid 1980s she has repeatedly visualised its images and structure in her own practice...' Read more
Fold out futures: Vol,1, Chicago project, Irene Barberis and Karen Forbes. Melbourne: RMIT Press, 2007
Studio International
book review, published 26/06/2008:
'Dr Irene Barberis teaches and researches at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. She has recently collaborated in Chicago with Professor Karen Forbes of Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) in developing Metasenta, a vital, compact arts research hub, which functions internationally between universities and the wider arts and business communities...' Read more
Apocalypse in Pink: The Work of Irene Barberis
Studio International
published 26/03/2007
'The role of faith in society and in art has been addressed in numerous forms since the new millennium, yet it is by definition problematic...' Read more
Faithfully Female: The New Work of Irene Barberis
by Natalie King, for the exhibition Intersections: Reading the Space, at the Jewish Museum of Australia, Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, 2005
'Yielding, pliable, embroidered, draped, stretched, leaning, hanging, drooping. Irene Barberis' pink plastic sculptures rejoice in the minimal and conceptual art of the mid-twentieth century, in particular that of Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt, while taking us on a spiritual high towards synthetic consumerism...' Read more
Seeing through the material
by Dr. Wilma Tabacco, for the exhibition #5 Plastique, at Helen Maxwell, Canberra, 2003
'Irene Barberis loves her plastic material. She becomes unashamedly out of control talking about the way its gaudy, iridescent colours can shimmer with beauty, the way its translucence can bathe viewer and environment in coloured light... Read more
Plastique: a coincident of mind and materials
by Anna Clabburn, for exhibitions Plastique, 2002
'Plastic is not something we often think of in an adjectival sense - that is, as a 'doing' word. In a cultural context, it is usually envisaged as a noun, most often associated with the ever-proliferating field of disposable gadgets molded in gauche colours and designed for singular purposes...' Read more