Irene Barberis facts for kids

Irene Barberis is an amazing artist from Australia and Britain. She lives in both Melbourne and London. Irene is mostly known for her paintings, but she also creates cool art installations, drawings, and uses new technology in her art. She even started an international art research center and helps organize art shows around the world. She also writes about art!

About Irene Barberis

Irene Barberis was born in Chiswick, London, in 1953. She grew up in the countryside of Victoria, Australia. When she was young, she loved classical ballet and started dancing at just three years old! She stopped dancing at 19 after an injury.

Becoming an Artist

Irene became interested in art and studied at the Preston Institute. After that, she earned a special diploma from the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) in Melbourne. In 1979, she won a special award called the Keith and Elizabeth Murdoch Travelling Fellowship. This allowed her to travel to Paris, France, where she lived, worked, and showed her art from 1980 to 1982.

Later, Irene continued her studies, earning a Master of Fine Art and a PhD. She became a Senior Lecturer at RMIT University, teaching painting in Melbourne and Hong Kong. She also founded the Global Centre for Drawing and Metasenta Publications, which publishes art books.

Irene's Art and Projects

Irene Barberis has been creating art since the mid-1970s. Her art often explores big ideas, sometimes even using stories from the Bible. She has shown her artwork all over the world since the 1980s.

The LeWitt Project

Irene was friends with a famous American artist named Sol LeWitt for many years. After he passed away, Irene was the first artist (besides his daughter) to work in his studio in Chester, USA. She spent many months there, studying his work and how he created art.

In 2019, Irene started "The LeWitt Project." This is a big research and exhibition program that will take place in ten different countries! It explores how Sol LeWitt and his ideas have influenced art. The project started in the UK in 2023 and will come to Melbourne, Australia, and Hong Kong in 2024.

Irene also wrote a wonderful book in 2022 about Sol LeWitt's studio. It has lots of pictures showing his studio exactly as he left it.

The Tapestry of Light

One of Irene's most amazing projects is "The Tapestry of Light." This project has been going on for over 20 years! It's a huge, special tapestry that explores ideas about light and the end of the world, inspired by an old 14th-century tapestry.

What is it?

The Tapestry of Light is a massive artwork, about 3.2 meters tall and 36 meters long! It's made from traditional threads but also uses cool, new "nano particle phosphorescent science." This means the tapestry actually changes how it looks as the light around it changes. It was woven on a special loom in Flanders, a place famous for tapestries.

The tapestry has fourteen different panels. Some are small, and some are very large. Above the images, the entire text of the Book of Revelation (a book from the Bible) floats in the air when the tapestry is shown in a dark room. This artwork is special because it's the first full "Apocalypse" art cycle created by a female artist in over 500 years!

Where it's been shown

The Tapestry of Light was first shown in Brussels, Belgium, in 2017. Then it traveled to Canterbury Cathedral in the UK, where over 14,500 people came to see it! In 2019-2020, it was shown at the Museum of the Bible in Washington D.C., USA. This incredible artwork has been featured in many news stories and art discussions around the world.

Metasenta

Irene Barberis is also the founder and director of Metasenta. This is an international center for art research. It works with universities like RMIT University in Melbourne and the University of the Arts, London. Through Metasenta, Irene has started many international art projects, exhibitions, publications, and even films.

She also created a mobile art gallery called The DrawingSpace in Melbourne. Metasenta is known for publishing important art books, like a big survey of Australian drawing called Contemporary Australian Drawing #1. Irene has also organized many large international art shows, bringing together artists from different countries.