Alvaro Barrington Rose from Concrete, Two Yellow Roses, Singapore, 2022, 2022

This new work is part of a series through which Alvaro Barrington celebrates the centrality of music as a constant source of inspiration in his practice. The artist describes the work as the result of his ongoing pursuit to ‘turn physical the music that I love’. Its title references Tupac Shakur’s autobiographical poem ‘The Rose That Grew From Concrete’, which explores the potential for beauty and fragility to arise from harsh surroundings. Barrington explains that he pursued ‘this idea that even in the toughest conditions there are people that are beautiful and fragile and tough – all the kind of qualities that you see in a rose’. His use of materials, here concrete and cardboard in particular, directly references the urban landscape in which he grew up. As the artist recounts: ‘cement holds this memory of being a kid and when they would put a pavement on the street, as kids we would put our feet in there or draw all over it. And that was one of our first real sites of drawing and painting.’