Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects presents the first NYC solo exhibition of paintings by Yevgeniya Baras, Of Things Soothsaid and Spoken, in our gallery at 208 Forsyth St.

Yevgeniya Baras’s small-scale, textured oil paintings reconfigure abstraction as a kind of talismanic skin. Baras incorporates a variety of materials into her paintings: wood, yarn, paper-maché and foil. Her distressed and encrusted surfaces collected gestures, cuts and marks recall the traces of age, devotion and obsession found in ritual objects and textiles of tribal cultures.

Baras’s paintings engage a remarkable range of associations yet preserve the experience of visual intimacy. In her own words, “Among other themes, my symbolic investigations consider: the landscape, the body as a shell, closeness, division, burdens, coupling, guilt and loneliness. For me, symbolism is a way to celebrate the mystery.” The iconography and facture of Baras’s works may be linked to artists as diverse as Eva Hesse, Tracey Emin, Ana Mendieta and Arthur Dove.

Baras was awarded a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant in 2014. She is a cofounder of Regina Rex Gallery, the influential artist run exhibition space, originally based in Bushwick and now located in the Lower East Side, as well as Bull and Ram Gallery in Bushwick. Baras received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007. Baras’s work has been seen in numerous group exhibitions in Brooklyn and New York City.

The opening reception of the exhibition will take place on Saturday, February 21, from 6-9 pm. Please contact the gallery for further information and visual materials.