Fall Release 2025

“Beautiful World”

Paintings by Myra Barraza

In defiant intimacy, Myra Barraza’s recent paintings are charged with the friction of the present and the unstoppable momentum of living.

Taking its title from Devo’s 1981 chorus of ironic dissonance –It's a beautiful world, for you, not me– this series explores the concept of beauty whilst holding full knowledge of its complicity and inadequacy in the face of societal collapse.

The artist brings to this work a double consciousness forged in El Salvador’s civil war during the 1980s where she grew up: the uncanny coexistence of death and survival, tragedy and frivolity. This isn’t trauma aestheticised but metabolised –a sense of beauty that emerges through rather than despite violence. Her metamodern sensibility articulates both the critique (the awareness of inequality and suffering) and a genuine aesthetic exploration of beauty, without collapsing into either cynicism or naivete.

The epistolary gestures in titles such as ”Dear Vincent…” position the work in dialogue with art history whilst asserting something radically human. These aren’t homages but open letters written across time and distance, reaching towards artists who each negotiated their own relationships to beauty under duress. There’s a sense of loneliness here, but also an insistence on dialogue and the need for connection and community.

Crucially, Barraza’s works assert painting’s radical humanness against AI’s frictionless state. Where algorithms optimise, these paintings carry the weight of embodied experience, of physical mediation with materials and the exquisite evidence of time.

Devo may have foretold humanity’s devolution towards mechanisation, yet these paintings model what remains: the artist's capacity to hold despair and hope simultaneously, to make beauty from and about collapse, to continue the conversation precisely because it matters that we do.