Glory Ingrid Baars | NYCH Gallery 

Exhibiting Feb 13th-  March 29th 

 

BIO 

 

Ingrid Baars graduated from the Willem de Kooning Academy of Art in Rotterdam in the early nineties and worked as an independent illustrator and photographer. In 2010 she decided to concentrate solely on her own artistic development, which previously coexisted with her commercial activities (e.g. Nike, Singapore Airlines, Nikon). She started showing her work in Galleries from the year 2000 onwards. She was a 1997 winner of the Illustration Year Award in the Netherlands and a 2008 winner in the category photography of the Art Directors Club Netherlands and winner in the Color Awards USA in 2011, nominated multiple times and published in international design and art magazines since 2005. 

Artist Statement 

Having mastered the art of digital collage I decided to explore this terrain further and create images from scratch exploring the two basic paradigms of photography, actual photography and photographic truth. In choosing artistic truth I play with both. Actual photography is the core of all my work but I create my own image world conceptually imagined, self 

contained, moments frozen in time. I try to express the spiritual and the supernatural, to imbue my portraits with an inner life, to harbor the complexity of emotions in women and the force that it can exude. 

The process is experimental, I do not have a preconceived notion of what the outcome of my exploration will be. I'm curious to discover what will happen. Molding, folding, building, combining, applying streaks and blobs of color and making them sing with all the intensity I could. I walk a new, different path each time I work on a new piece. Each time I do something I have never done before, I never follow the same patterns. Visual information can come from everywhere. I love to discover beauty in unusual places. When I'm at work I become a part of it. I am very near. I'm stepping into my work. I'm not fully aware of what I'm doing. I don't have rules, nor methods. I'm observing and studying, I'm pushing myself to find an alchemy between me and my subject until I am my subject, until my soul melts into my art. 

 

Africa 

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When I first started out with my African series back in 2011 l was mainly drawn to the esthetics of black women and classical African sculptures. 

I saw a representational style that is as abstract as it is naturalistic. There was grace, symbolism, mythology and a deeper almost religious sense that fascinated me. 

Another world opened up and with it my interest in black women increased. 

As my series progressed I began to receive a lot of emotional messages from Afro American women expressing how they see themselves depicted in my art in such a powerful and beautiful way which made me wonder about the status of black women both in Africa and the diaspora. I learned about their suffering through the ages and couldn't understand that black women were among the most demoralized, and devalued people in the world and that at the same time they were the origin of our species. 

I realized that through my art I could actually contribute to the cause of black female empowerment. The body of my work developed into an homage to black women.

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