Inma Barrero

Lévy Gorvy Dayan opens Inma Barrero: Mothers, the artist's first exhibition with the gallery. The presentation brings together eight large-scale sculptures, each on view for the first time, that represent a different maternal presence informed by prehistoric, ancient, and modern worlds across global continents. The sculptures come together to create, in Barrero's words, a "chorus" of mother figures, "bearing witness and answering one another across the room."

The basis of Barrero's work is the handmade ceramic bead, with hundreds of beads joining to create a single sculpture. The beads take their inspiration from divine and universal sources, from the artist's memories of her grandmother's rosary to Greek komboloi (worry beads), and Buddhist prayer beads, which she encountered while living and working in Kyoto. To form the beads, she employs unconventional combinations of porcelain, earthenware, and terracotta, as well as soils from Japan, Mexico, and Spain to "unite different sources of earth in the figure of the mother." She merges these with different glazing techniques and links or "weaves" the beads with metal wire, an homage to two forms of ceramic repair—the Spanish lañado, which restores ceramics with metal bindings or lañas—and the Japanese kintsugi, which mends breakages with lacquer dusted with powdered metals, such as gold.

When creating her anthropometric abstractions, Barrero does not work off of sketches; instead, as she describes, “The sculptures emerge before their names,” continuing “forms accumulate—standing, reclining, carrying, enclosing, spilling.” Her titles are informed by mythical and historical sources and images, yet remain open to interpretation. Pachamama (2023–26), with its triangular composition, alludes to the Virgin Mary, while the reclining Tellus (2023–26) evokes alluring art-historical odalisques. The floor sculpture Ataecina (2023–26) rises from the ground like an archeologically excavated figure. Barrero’s references to history are purposeful. “It is important to create a connection to the past,” she states. “The sculptures connect me to something primordial, primitive, and beautiful.” Their soulfulness resonates today.

The composition The Mothers’ Voice (2026) by Barrero, created in collaboration with Yannick Paget and Yumiko Tanimura, will play in the exhibition space. The work features the sounds of Barrero’s ceramic beads moving and making contact with each other, as well as Tanimura’s voice, against a seascape.

Born in 1969 in Almendralejo, Spain, the artist Inma Barrero bases her multidisciplinary practice, including sculpture, installation, and sound art, in the tradition of ceramics. Her large-scale sculptural creations are composed of hundreds of individually handcrafted beads—that represent both the seeds of nature as well as prayer beads used in religions throughout the world—and combine divergent ceramic techniques. Barrero’s turn to the ceramic medium in the early 2000s coincided with her becoming a mother. Finding inspiration across time and geography, the themes of womanhood, motherhood, and community, as well as making and repairing, underlie her practice. Barrero currently lives and works in New York.

Barrero’s work has been the subject of exhibitions at the Monastery of Panagia Evangelistria, Skiathos, Greece (2026); Kyotographie, Kyoto (2025, 2023); and Instituto Cervantes, New York (2023). Her work will feature in a forthcoming group presentation at the Hispanic Society Museum and Library in New York (2026). In 2023, she presented Be the Drop that Shapes the Wave at the French Institute Alliance Française, New York, in conjunction with the United Nations Water Conference. Her work is in the collections of the Hispanic Society Museum and Library, New York, and the Inter-American Development Bank, Washington, DC.