Glenn Barr: The Beautiful and the Banal
Gallery at Ideation Orange
420 W. Nine Mile Rd.
Hazel Park
Through Dec. 30
Detroit is as much a source of inspiration to the work of visual artist Glenn Barr as the rest of his influences: vintage pulp magazines, B movies, Hanna-Barbera cartoons, rock ’n’ roll, and other retro references. His paintings and drawings are populated by both beautiful, realistically rendered people and stylized cartoons (sometimes even in the same image), situated in cabarets, drab apartments, and other post-industrial settings. The Ferndale-based artist made a name for himself in the late ’90s and early 2000s, representing Detroit as part of the so-called lowbrow art or pop surrealism scene home to artists like Mark Ryden and Robert Williams.
Barr has returned with his first local solo show in 10 years, on display now at a gallery space inside Ideation Orange, a design firm in Hazel Park. Billed as a new collection of work, the show features more of the same that fans have come to love from Barr. He is lucky to have found his muses.
A sense of uneasiness hangs over just about all of the images, which seem like they could be movie stills or comic book panels. Paintings featuring home telephones or domestic scenes are a recurring theme. “Kidnapped” depicts a Black woman who could be a housewife, a cigarette in one hand and a phone receiver clutched in the other as she looks over her shoulder, agitated. Meanwhile, in “She Said,” two women drink coffee in a kitchen, though one appears to be in an uncomfortable pose, leaving viewers to imagine what sort of conversation they might be eavesdropping on.
Another body of work features glamorous people wearing far-out space suits, with bombs scrawled on their helmets like the mission tallies on World War II bombers, as if to evoke the dark side of the arms and space races.
Barr’s images are tight yet loose. They are rendered in detail with excellent use of color theory, mixing warm and cool hues while retaining coarse acrylic brush strokes. Some are painted directly on wood panels and, in at least one case, a discarded road sign.
As an established name in the fine art world, Barr commands thousands of dollars for his paintings, though some prints are available at a lower price point. This is pop art, after all.
Follow Midbrow Detroit on social media:
Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, X.
