Barbara Westermann

Who is Barbara Westermann?

Barbara Westermann is a conceptual sculptor living in New York City. She has shown her work widely, including shows at Bell Gallery of Brown University, Art Resources Transfer, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Museum für Neue Kunst Freiburg in Germany. She has taught a course called Materiality and Social Sculpture at the New School for Social Research in New York for many years, as well as studio courses at Providence College, Roger Williams University, and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Westermann's recent work is a conceptual alphabet to monitor the way we see the human body, the architectonics and literatures of sky and earth, and the music which courses through the world's membrane. Westermann adopts the vocabulary of minimalist art, using elemental abstract shapes, but at the same time she goes beyond the minimalist rigid, impersonal character. Instead, her work keeps its orientation toward some narrative or poetic contents, which although never explicitly conveyed is suggestive of a range of moods and sentiments. Moreover, by choosing the color white for all her pieces, she recalls the modernist notion of purity of forms and materials by which the matter is transformed into spirit. It is this contemplative quality that gives Westermann’s work a special power, referring back to the meaning of “observatory” as a place for observation and contemplation.