Barbara Kuebel draws inspiration from those moments of discomfort that arise in our social interactions. Through her wood engravings in life size, handcrafted, she offers an almost physical experience of art. Her portraits, halfway between abstraction and figuration, give shape to vivid emotions: tension, isolation, tenderness, or confrontation. For her, it is not the details that matter, but the gesture. She composes with shapes and graphic contrasts to evoke a raw emotional intensity.
Barbara Kuebel: A work between raw expression and formal rigor
Originally from Austria, trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, she developed a strong plastic language early on: monochrome palette, bold pencil strokes, backgrounds reduced to the essentials. Her figures, often knotted or compressed, strike with their monumentality and strangeness. The black and white there becomes almost material, transcending simple color to impose a visual density.
With her deliberately unrealistic abstract bodies, Barbara Kuebel frees herself from traditional codes of representation. She invites one to look differently, to get lost in the possibilities. A way for her to liberate the gaze, and art, from any fixed expectation.
Journey and exhibitions
Her work has been praised in publications such as This Is Colossal or 10 Years of The Other Art Fair by Saatchi Art. A finalist in the No Dead Artists exhibition in 2020 at the Jonathan Ferrara Gallery in New Orleans, she regularly exhibits in the United States and Europe.
Barbara Kuebel currently lives in Daphne, Alabama. In 2023, she notably participated in the Shadow Jumpers exhibition at the Jonathan Ferrara Gallery and at the New York Paper Fair.
