Barnaby Whitfield

Spinello Projects presents My Bones To Blossom, the debut solo exhibition with the gallery by Brooklyn-based painter Barnaby Whitfield.

My Bones To Blossom is deeply informed by Barnaby Whitfield’s wisdom and practice in permaculture, the study of self-sustaining systems that integrate the ecosystem and agriculture for the generation of abundant resources. He uses the ideas of social permaculture to world-build through painting places for queers and nature to coexist and represent each other, exchanging meaning and truth with one another. Whitfield uses history and naturalism to infuse meaning into the subtle use of symbolism in his painting.

Cloaked with a hysterical unease under the guise of genre painting, Whitfield’s carefully constructed world is inhabited by fearless-bodied queer regenerative farmers whose sustainable practices and closed-loop gardening systems create autonomy from the outside world. In this world Whitfield is a character painting en plein air, where the phallus is a sprawling landscape, the Paw Paw fruit is currency and bletted (derived from the French poire blette meaning ‘overripe pear’) persimmons can, in full, act as a metaphor for gay bodies pushed to extreme joy, exploration and acceptance–just like the process of softening fleshy fruit can go beyond ripening to rotten and sweet. This will be Whitfield’s first solo exhibition in his hometown of Miami.