In Between Stars

Pink, blue, pur­ple, gray—the Milky Way has a rede­fined look in Theodor Barr’s Mother of the Uni­verse. Inspired by astron­omy, Barr uti­lizes media such as tar, acrylic, oil, and lazur col­ors in order to cap­ture the dark and glim­mer­ing essence of the deep space, the fan­tas­tic galax­ies, plan­ets, white dwarfs, and red giants. “To sub­stan­ti­ate I decided to use a unique mate­r­ial that could link the dis­sim­i­lar realms,” Barr says in his artist state­ment. “Tar, this ancient reminder of life on the planet, became my pri­mary mate­r­ial in trans­pos­ing galac­tic images to can­vas.”
Mother of the Uni­verse exudes the mys­tique of cre­ation in such an awe-inspiring way that the viewer is imme­di­ately engrossed upon the sight of the piece. A red spot in the cen­ter of the paint­ing, small as it is, intro­duces a strong con­trast against the rel­a­tively dim back­ground. Below the red spot, pink­ish cloud-shaped explo­sions clut­ter at the lower left­hand side of the paint­ing. Barr is dex­ter­ous when it comes to apply­ing mul­ti­lay­ers and mix­tures of dark cold tar and bright acrylic col­ors, on which oil and lazurs give the impres­sion of extra­or­di­nary out­er­space. In tar-based Mother of the Uni­verse espe­cially, Barr has estab­lished a secret way of encap­su­lat­ing the whole cos­mos in a 60-inch frame. *
Theodor Barr is an Israeli artist. Cather­ine Yu-Shan Hsieh is an asso­ciate edi­tor at NY Arts.