Inma Barrero: MOTHERS
17 September - 17 October 2026
Lévy Gorvy Dayan
19 East 64 Street

Scroll to the bottom of this webpage to preview works on view.

In its jewel-box fifth floor gallery, Lévy Gorvy Dayan is pleased to present MOTHERS, a solo exhibition of eight large-scale, handmade-bead sculptures by Spain-born, New York-based artist Inma Barrero (b. 1969), whose approach to sculpture is rooted in a surrealist spirit and an exploration of the feminine. The exhibition takes the form of a “chorus” of mother figures, anthropomorphic abstractions “bearing witness and answering one another across the room.” A satellite space, on the gallery's third floor, presents five additional works juxtaposed against the 1932 Beaux-Arts townhouse's gilded moulding and interiors.

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, Barrero 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 “weaves” the beads with metal wire, an homage to two forms of ceramic repair: the Japanese kintsugi, which mends breakage cracks with visible inlay such as gold (often by way of lacquer dusted with powdered metals), and the Spanish lañado, which restores ceramics with metal bindings called lañas. Overall in her sculptures, Barrero is influenced by places, objects, and the qualities of light from her native Southern Spain.

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More information is in the above-linked press release, and a preview of works on view is below. See the Dropbox folder linked above to download web-resolution image files. Artwork information is in each image’s file title. Image reuse must be exclusively in association with press coverage of the exhibition.