Todd Gray: Portals
Perrotin, Los Angeles, US
Colleen Barry: Iconophilia
Half Gallery, New York, US
On view until April 25 at Half Gallery in New York, Colleen Barry’s Iconophilia addresses a visual culture in which images continue to seduce even as they become objects of doubt. While researching iconoclasm—the destruction of images for political or religious reasons—Barry looked up its opposite and found “iconophilia”: the worship of pictures. It is a title that lands rather well in the present moment, when images are multiplying like rabbits and trust in them seems to be disappearing just as quickly. Iconoclasm, iconophilia, iconophobia, or perhaps even iconomania. It is not easy being an image right now, yet Barry demonstrates that even in a state of visual overload, our appetite for painting remains remarkably intact—if anything, it only makes us crave it more.
That craving is promptly met upon entering the exhibition, where fourteen oil paintings—smaller, intimate works on panel and larger, more bodily works on linen—fill the gallery. Exquisite brushwork shifts between lush, buttery virtuosity and areas of rupture where the underpainting is left exposed. Add to this the radiant yellowish flesh tones and the sharp use of chromatic contrast, for instance, in the orange she-wolf against a green background, and the result is hard to resist. For anyone still vulnerable to the seductions of painting—that ancient image technology—the show is a feast.
We used to feast on image-making with a similar wonder—or smash them to pieces, one or the other. Now we squint at them suspiciously and ask whether they were made by a machine. Barry is not wagging her finger at artificial intelligence, but she is paying close attention to the new unease around pictures: the way people now look at an image and immediately ask whether it is AI, as though suspiciously inspecting a passport at the border. Iconophilia takes this atmosphere seriously, while refusing to give up on the power of the image itself. Reading the press release, I felt slightly caught red-handed, as those exact thoughts had already crossed my mind while following the increasingly imaginative evolution of her practice over the past few years. But I could not care less, because these paintings can possibly pierce through even the shortest doomscroll-attention span and reset us to our default settings: worshipping images—iconophilia.
Several of the new paintings feature gorgons—cousins, Barry notes, to gargoyles—whose role is not to charm but to protect. They are meant to look frightening, and they do not disappoint. In one split-screen painting, Barry places a recumbent female nude beside these monstrous guardians, using them to defend what she describes as the sacred aspect of the body in such a vulnerable pose. Elsewhere, Barry places contemporary figures inside symbolic structures that echo much older forms of image-making.
In Origo, a colossal pregnant woman towers above a miniature cluster of ancients gathered around a fire. Barry describes her as a contemporary fertility figure, even a kind of Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. The painting turns on a biological fact that is almost too good not to use: a woman carrying a female fetus contains three generations at once, since that unborn child already carries the eggs she will one day produce. It is one of those details that makes iconography feel suddenly less like dusty art history and more like something alive, if slightly unnerving.
The exhibition’s single self-portrait, Petrine, folds this logic back onto the artist herself. Barry paints herself wearing a clay facial mask. The title comes from the Latin for rock or stone, as if painting is here to emulate with sculpture once more, while the only visible part of Barry’s face is a pair of striking blue eyes rendered in Caribbean turquoise. But blue eyes, she reminds us, are not actually blue—they are the effect of Rayleigh scattering, light bent and perceived as color. It is a fitting final note for a show that keeps circling back to the same problem: how easily perception hardens into belief, and how quickly images become doctrine. As a result, I conclude that Iconophilia proposes that pictures can still protect, seduce, warn, and misbehave a little. Frankly, one wishes more of them did.
For more information, please consult Half Gallery’s website here →
Last Updated on April 2, 2026
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About the author:
Julien Delagrange (b. 1994, BE) is an art historian, contemporary artist, and the director of CAI and CAI Gallery. Previously, Delagrange has worked for the Centre for Fine Arts (BOZAR) in Brussels, the Jan Vercruysse Foundation, and the Ghent University Library. His artistic practice and written art criticism are strongly intertwined, examining contemporary art in search of new perspectives in the art world.
