Alvaro Barrington: The artist bringing carnival and the Caribbean to Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries
By Louisa Buck
With his new London commission, the Venezuela-born painter is exploring the UK’s impact around the globe with a sweeping installation partly inspired by his grandmother’s plastic sofa coverings
The rise of Alvaro Barrington has been a rapid one: in the same year that he graduated from London’s Slade School of Art in 2017, he had his first institutional show at MoMA PS1 in New York. Since then, he has had a widely acclaimed solo show at the South London Gallery in 2021 and has worked with some of the world’s leading commercial galleries, where he has rewritten the artist representation rulebook by having ongoing and amicably fluid relationships with around eight different establishments worldwide.
Born in 1983 in Venezuela to a Haitian father and a Grenadian mother, Barrington was raised in the Caribbean and New York, and is now based in London. A commitment to community underpins his multifarious practice with artistic collaborations ranging across exhibitions, performances, concerts, carnivals and fashion projects. Although he is predominantly known as a painter, Barrington’s materials are also infinitely various, encompassing concrete, yarn, carpet, burlap, found postcards, metal security shutters and musical instruments. These are also often used in combination to form entire environments.
Barrington is the latest artist to undertake Tate Britain’s prestigious Duveen Galleries commission where he is showing Grace, an all-encompassing multimedia installation that includes paintings, sculpture, furniture and a soundscape, with a title that pays tribute to Amazing Grace, a 1993 work by his former teacher and mentor Nari Ward.
The Art Newspaper: How did you consider tackling the extensive Neo-Classical Duveen Galleries that run down the centre of Tate Britain?
Alvaro Barrington: As someone who’s not British, but the consequence of British history and who now lives here, I thought it was a great opportunity to think through what that meant for me and how I experienced it, and to put it in the spaces at Tate Britain. I think that was the most honest thing I could do. The history that is playing out in front of you is a result of that—good and bad. So there’s carnival culture, one of the greatest things that I think happened, but there’s also parts that deal with the migration part; a lot of people in the Windrush generation and after had to leave their family back home. And their family had to imagine what had happened when they came back. All of those are consequences of Britain’s reach around the world. And I am a product of that.
Your response is intensely personal: nearly half of the space is taken up by an installation and soundscape that evokes your early childhood in Grenada.
We’ve covered a third of the South Duveens with this tin roof, and we’re creating a soundscape that’s basically from this memory I have of living with my grandma in Grenada. My mom got pregnant when she was 17 and my grandma, like many other women in my community, took me in. We lived in this really small shack in the countryside, and it was the happiest and the safest I’ve ever felt. I have this memory of the rain coming and me and my cousins, we’d run into the house to play and the rain would be hitting the tin roof. So we have the sound of rain dropping and some people are also creating music: Andrew Hale, the Mangrove Steelband, Dev Hynes [who is] also known as Blood Orange. And we are streaming [Hackney-based] NTS Radio at random times. On four structures are yarn paintings that are a mix between Kandinsky and Sonia Delaunay, so it’s like looking outside into the garden as the rain blends into the sound and colour. Then you sit on these ten couches that I’ve designed, which have these blankets that you can wrap around you, and these have a different narrative meaning held within them. You can look at my story and my mom’s story all becoming one story.
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The rest of the Duveens commission is devoted to the carnival.
I love carnival culture and the second part is like being thrown into carnival. I’ve made 55 paintings of all these different carnival people—Jab Jab, Moko Jumbie on his stilts, Blue Devil—in a crowd which you are forced to walk through and around. In the Duveens rotunda there’s a 3m-high sculpture of Samantha, my sister of 30 years, dancing in Bikini Mas. Carnival is one of the only public places where you could see a woman dancing in a bikini; everyone knows this is her space and you can’t go up and dance with her. She’s dancing for herself. It’s a wonderful thing that the community has done to create a public space for a woman—and a man sometimes—and so I asked Samantha if I could borrow her likeness. We had a discussion about what it represents and how we make it happen. It was important to get the narrative right, and for a time it slowed me down. But I talked to Samantha and the community, and it’s not about a naked woman made by a male; it’s about carnival and how the community has created a space for her. My community’s truth is our truth; it’s a whole different perspective.
It is as if Samantha is the queen of the carnival, emerging out of a steel drum.
You’re 2m away because she’s standing right in the middle of a steel drum; and I’ve invited [the US drummer] Marcus Gilmore to come over and perform a panorama. The designer Jawara Alleyne is designing the bikini and the twins Soull and Dynasty Ogun are going to create a headpiece. I’m going to paint her like Phyllida Barlow painted her work; it’s as if she’s come out of J’ouvert morning carnival straight into Bikini Mas.
Is this the first figurative sculpture you’ve made?
Yes, she’s like my version of Botticelli’s Venus. One of the things I was thinking about was Venus’s backstory, which was that she was Aphrodite in Greece, but before that, in the Middle East, in areas like Iraq, she was Ishtar, the mother warrior figure. And I thought there was something really interesting about the black bodies that are taken from their mothers in Africa, and how they became daughters of whiteness. But I grew up in an era where Blackness is not a daughter of whiteness. We’re our own mother; we’ve created so much culture. Hip hop culture, reggae culture, fashion—we were the originators and creators of all these things. Blackness is its own thing. Growing up, we were having the best time; we were the coolest kids on the fucking block!
