About

Robert Baribeau was born in Aberdeen WA in 1949. He received his BS from Portland State University in 1978, and his MFA from the Pratt Institute in 1979. He has been honored with a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, a Pratt Institute Art Department Grant/Fellowship, and a Florence Saltzman-Heidel Foundation Grant. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, Artnews, The New York Times, The New York Sunand New York Magazine. Baribeau lives and works in Stanfordville, New York.

His extensive career involves the close examination and abstraction of nature. Trained as a landscape architect, Baribeau’s keen sense of perspective and composition evoke impressions of land, sea and sky. Since the 1970’s, Baribeau has channeled the raw energy of post-war abstraction. Sharing Robert Rauschenberg’s engagement with collage, many of Baribeau’s paintings employ a variety of mixed media, passionate gesture and experimental techniques. Works from the late 90s are dominated by thickly painted, hard-edged geometries and the adoption of found household materials, such as maps, patterned fabrics, and cardboard, as collage elements. Since the early 2000s Baribeau has produced several series, including his esteemed flowers and cigarbox paintings, as well as his Field and Milbrook series, for which he applies thick mixtures of oil paint, acrylic, clear latex, and collage, onto canvases that evoke Diebenkorn’s Berkeleypaintings or Rauschenberg’s Combines.

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