Barkley L. Hendricks

The second book of the project is devoted to the landscape paintings by the artist.

Skira and Jack Shainman Gallery have partnered to realize an unprecedented book project dedicated to the artist Barkley L. Hendricks. The second book of the series, after Works on Paper, is dedicated to the landscape paintings of the artist.

Barkley L. Hendricks was originally a student of landscape painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the late 1960s, where he also discovered a love for photography. However, it was only in the 1980s that he decided to veer away from making the large figurative paintings that became his trademark style in favor of outdoor landscape painting. For the next two decades, during vacations to Jamaica, he would dedicate himself to views of the country in oval and lunette forms.

The publication, which presents for the first time a selection of landscape paintings by the artist, is enriched with a contribution by art critic, art historian and scholar Barry Schwabsky. Jack Shainman Gallery exhibits and represents contemporary artists from all over the world, and is one of today’s leading private art galleries worldwide, based in New York City.

The project is made up of 5 parts: it consists of 4 booklets each of which provides an in-depth exploration of a corpus of works integral to the artist’s output (Works on Paper, Landscape Paintings, Basketball Paintings, Photography) as well as a comprehensive 300-page monograph which traces the artist’s evolution for the entirety of his career.

The project is tied to an extensive and never-accomplished-before recovery of the artist’s archive. Each book will contain essays by different scholars that are leading international players. The booklets are important because they allow for a detailed, oriented study of key bodies of works. They will be indispensable to art lovers, museums and art historians, providing further material of study and reading in addition to the comprehensive monograph.

Hendricks is an artist profoundly integral and pivotal to art and African-American culture. Barkley L. Hendricks was a painter and photographer best known for his realist and post-modern portraits of people of color living in urban areas beginning in the 1960s and 70s and continuing to the present.