Sheila Barcik

Sheila Barcik was born in Buffalo in 1960. She holds a BFA and a BS in Design from Buffalo State College, and an MFA from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is the recipient of the following grants: New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship; a one-year grant and residency, and a project grant at Kuenstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral, Bad Ems, Germany; the nation-wide German grant, Kunstfond Bonn; a grant and residency at Kuenstlerhaus Schloss Wiepersdorf, Germany; and most recently residencies in 2013 and 2017 at The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Taos, NM. Her work is in many private and public collections including: Kunstkredit Basel-Stadt, Switzerland, Kunstsammlung, Rheinland-Palatinate, Germany, and Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, Ramagen, Germany. Barcik relocated to Buffalo in 2017 after living in Europe for nearly thirty years, the last seventeen of which she spent in Germany (mostly in Berlin). She has exhibited most widely in Germany and Switzerland and is best known for her large-scale grids of works on paper, which she has been exhibiting since 2000. A solo exhibition of Barcik’s work titled “From the Core” is scheduled to open at Buffalo Arts Studio on January 25th, 2019. (Gary Sczerbaniewicz/Sheila Barcik, Anna Kaplan Contemporary, Buffalo, NY, December 7, 2018-January 4, 2019—a two-person show of sculpture by Gary Sczerbaniewicz and works on paper by Sheila Barcik.)

Sheila Barcik explores life, existence, and the existential experiences of searching and surviving in the contemporary world. Barcik constructs grids of single sheet drawings, each presenting a unique space in time. Together,  the small works form new images that flow from one moment to the next. The unsettling landscapes function as a cryptic schematic, populated with figurative and symbolic forms that are both familiar and foreign. Barcik invites the viewer to wander slowly through this ambivalent environment, taking time with each individual drawing as well as the full installation. (Sheila Barcik, From the Core, Buffalo Arts Studio, January 25-March 2, 2019.)