At the Core: Recent Paintings by Barbara Sternberger

Since the early 2000s, Barbara Sternberger has charted an independent path in her painting practice that redefined the parameters of her work. With a well-defined formal structure in place for the making of her paintings, she has enriched her narrative with intellectual and aesthetic reinforcement in sources as diverse as Chinese philosophers writing on the ancient art of painting and American artist Phillip Guston’s reflections on the struggles of a contemporary painter’s life in the studio. 

At The Core presents a selection of thirty oil paintings by Sternberger chosen from the Bellingham-based artist’s production since 2019. Centered on the Pathways Series, the exhibition explores Sternberger’s turn away from traditional easel painting in 2017–19 to directly engage with the materials and process of painting—from developing her own color palette and using dry pigments to make custom oil color bars for applying paint to letting go of brushes to work the paint freely with her hands on canvases attached to the wall.  

The illness and untimely death in 2017 of Sternberger’s younger sister confronted the artist with the brevity of life. In response, she embarked on a search for a more immediate and direct expression of emotion in her works…letting go of a lifetime of painting rules to be present in the artwork, to use color not form to discover the tenor of the day, to release color’s power to make the painting what it will become. She works each day to find and convey a sense of Chinese philosophy’s chi—the life force or “breath”—through color and in the dense surface physicality of two hands painting. The Pathways paintings’ fields of inflected whites subsuming earlier color layers evidence the artist’s restless process of discovery and denial, birthing and letting go. Into and across the white fields, Sternberger selectively arrays a tightly choreographed, deeply colored troupe of meandering color lines, washes that float or sink across the field, and jagged, vaguely hovering elliptical shapes. Without identifiable references, these abstract incidents engage and lead the eye into teasing spatial conundrums as illusionary space opens up or closes, and edges established are breached. 

The luminous paintings are a stirring witness to the success of Sternberger’s drive to be consciously present daily and fearless in the studio as she strives to imbue “breath” in individual marks and to build the rich cumulative surfaces of her abstract canvases with an authentic and fluid immediacy.  

Bruce Guenther
Art historian and independent curator

Barbara Sternberger

Barbara Sternberger is an exceptional abstract painter based in Bellingham, Washington. She has exhibited regionally and nationally, and her paintings are included in numerous private and public collections. AT THE CORE represents her third one-person museum exhibition. Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland represents the artist.

The Western Gallery thanks artist Barbara Sternberger and guest curator Bruce Guenther for the exquisite exhibition. The Homer Bernard Mathes Endowment and Marian Boylan Endowment generously supported AT THE CORE.

All images are copyright of the artist.