Alvaro Barrington Wants You to Stop Playing It Safe

For Alvaro Barrington’s current exhibition, 92-01 ‘In Livin Color’, the artist has turned Emalin’s new space into a fulsome monument to 1990s New York, where he came of age after moving from Venezuela to Brooklyn aged eight.

The gallery’s front desk has been replaced with a skateboarding ramp, next to which a gaggle of BMX bikes are chained to railings underneath two of the artist’s textile works. Elsewhere, a group of anthropomorphised storefronts wear braids, chains and Timberland boots. In one room, the floor is covered in bricks – a nod to the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and 90s – and a low iron grate looms overhead.

The inclusion of a gold-framed letter written by Tupac Shakur, titled NFS by Barrington, may seem incongruous in the context of a solo exhibition. “In hip-hop, you’re used to the feature,” he explains. “I’m not a rapper, but I always wanted to compete with rappers and musicians, so I thought: how could I get a feature from Tupac?”

In the note, which was a gift from Thaddaeus Ropac senior director Julia Peyton-Jones, the late rapper – Barrington’s “greatest of all time artist” – warns a lover that ‘WE MUST KEEP COMMUNICATIONS UP!!’

Alvaro Barrington, 92-01 ‘In Livin Color’, Emalin, London, UK. Courtesy of the artist and Emalin, London Photo: Arthur Gray

Music – specifically hip-hop and R&B – is a pervasive presence in the exhibition, as it was in a young Barrington’s New York. The gallery’s exterior wall is plastered with album covers by Nas, Lil’ Kim and Queen Latifah. Inside, an abstracted portrait of Biggie Smalls is rendered in yarn on burlap. We speak sitting on two upturned crates. Barrington turns down, but doesn’t turn off, the plastic stereo next to us.

Barrington is fluent in musical references, which he weaves convincingly into almost every answer he gives me. In our conversation, which is ostensibly about his approach to the art market, he rejects the line between different forms of cultural production as a premise. In an artworld that’s often anxious to distinguish its output as a higher pleasure, it’s refreshing.

“Black culture from the early 80s to the early 2000s was the greatest cultural renaissance, only rivalled by the Italian Renaissance,” Barrington says. “I mean everything from Michael Jordan to Tiger Woods to Oprah Winfrey to Thriller.” His own work is a product of his reverence for this uniquely broad canon.

Barrington rejects the idea that an artist’s development should be studiedly gradual, each new exhibition resembling the last one enough to constitute a coherent body of work. For him, the best thing an artist can be is honest.

Alvaro Barrington, 92-01 ‘In Livin Color’, Emalin, London, UK. Courtesy of the artist and Emalin, London Photo: Stephen James

He resists the art market’s orthodoxy of scarcity and restraint. Instead, he works polyamorously with a handful of galleries around the world, producing and showing multiple bodies of work in tandem. Alongside his institutional appearances, in the last year he has shown paintings with Sadie Coles in London, appliquéd collages at Thaddaeus Ropac in Salzburg and jute-rope assemblages at Massimo De Carlo in Milan.

Before Barrington moved to London in 2015 to study for an MFA at Slade, the American painter Carroll Dunham visited his studio in New York. He liked the manga-inspired cartoonish paintings that Barrington was making at the time. But he warned him that, if he didn’t diversify his output, he’d end up having a three-year career. “There’s nothing wrong with having a three-year career, because you’ll make more money than most people,” Barrington recalls him saying, “but, talking to you, I can tell you want something much larger than that.”

Dunham’s words stayed with him throughout his studies. “I ended up graduating with maybe 12 different ideas, and I could make a whole exhibition out of each idea, and I could make it for the next ten years with it evolving, changing, incorporating new ideas.” Almost a decade later, many of those ideas – painting on concrete; using embroidery to make abstracted images; using found postcards as a substrate – are still being developed in this exhibition.

When he looked around his graduating class, many artists had taken a more conservative route, he says: “It felt like a lot of people were setting themselves up to become one-hit wonders.”

Alvaro Barrington, Ariel Cumberbatch, Shamara Roper Never let them know ur next move, 2026 acrylic on mild steel, gold chain, plastic mannequins, synthetic hair, leather boots. Courtesy the artists and Emalin, London © Alvaro Barrington Photo: Stephen James

Still, to be a one-hit wonder is an enviable achievement for most. “A lot of artists that I know had that moment,” Barrington remembers. “I’m like, you made two, three million in two years. For most of my life, I was making near minimum wage.”

The story of such artists, the art market’s myth of Icarus, is a familiar one. Artists who can be convinced to produce predictable, visually consistent work are easy for dealers to market and sell. “If you could elevator-pitch that artist, it meant that you controlled everything that they do,” Barrington says. “It was a commodity.” The problem with commodities is that they’re vulnerable to market crashes: when a new trend arrives, collectors are inclined to offload them at auction and forget about the artist.

This perverse yet common market dynamic relies on art being treated as fungible. It assumes zero affinity between an artist and their collector. “I think art stopped fighting to become an integral part of who we are,” Barrington laments.

His sole hope for those who buy his work is that “it makes sense in their reality”. He hopes his work will speak to, and be collected by, those disenfranchised by art’s elitism. In his view, recent decades have seen the artworld serve “more and more esoteric groups of people, rather than broader cultures. That created a shrinkage, so art tied itself to finance.”

Against this background, he says his career is “a bet that more people started getting money listening to 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’ than they did studying finance at Harvard Business School.”

Alvaro Barrington, 92-01 ‘In Livin Color’, Emalin, London, UK/. Courtesy of the artist and Emalin, London. Photo: Stephen James

Ironically, Barrington’s crusade to democratise his work has seen him be accepted into the artworld’s inner sanctum. In 2024, his commission GRACE filled Tate Britain’s grand Duveen Galleries; this year he parked a haulage truck decorated like a carnival float (Labor Day Parade ’91) in the Giardini as part of the 61st Venice Biennale.

I once met a collector – admittedly, one who skewed more Harvard Business School than Get Rich or Die Tryin’ – who had filled a small room in his house with so many of Barrington’s chunky concrete paintings that it was becoming difficult to manoeuvre around them. He wanted more of them.

For such a popular and prolific artist, Barrington’s work rarely comes up at auction. He makes a distinction between followers and fans: it’s easy to click ‘unfollow’ – “in the art industry, that means it’s easy to say, ‘I’m gonna throw this to auction’” – but to be a fan requires something more enduring. “Tupac’s Dear Mama I can’t unfollow,” he says. “That’s part of my DNA. If you take that song away from me, I’m a different person.”

‘Say what u feel, not just what sounds good’, Tupac’s letter reads. That’s easily said but more difficult to do – for an artist or for a lover. Barrington saw early in his career, before he achieved the success he has today, how more market-friendly artists can be rewarded, even if their success is unsustainable: “Buy a house, get a teaching gig, have a family and live the rest of your life.”

When I suggest that, in an increasingly pressurised market set within an increasingly expensive world, some artists might simply act out of fear of the worst possible outcome, Barrington interrupts me: “Then you’re not an artist.”

“I became an artist because I want to die free,” he says. “I want to understand all of the decisions that I make and why I make them. I want to explore that in my art. I don’t want to judge myself.”