Yevgeniya Baras | Dreamfeeding

September 5 - October 18, 2025

Sargents’ Daughters is pleased to present Dreamfeeding, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Yevgeniya Baras. The exhibition will be on view through October 18th, 2025.

Dreamfeeding is a quiet, intimate moment of connection between parent and child. This state parallels the ways that the artist's work is born and how she invites the viewer to receive and encounter it. For Baras, the title reflects on nourishment, conscious and subconscious, as well as the power of care, and the hushed moments of contemplation we find in the night.

As a mother of two young children, Baras' relationship to time has changed. There is a direct translation of that relationship in the painting: the rapid dying process of fabric next to the laborious accumulation of oil-painted surface, as well as fast and slow passages that co-exist. Like tiles in a mosaic, the segments within the works are at once individual units of meaning and parts of a greater narrative. The compartmentalization of space in paintings parallels the way time is subdivided and portioned in Baras' life.

These works are premised on their borders: the painted or textural frames surround and raised lines divide the compositions into sections, cells and nooks. Many works have edges that expose the linen or burlap support, some dyed with thin washes of pigment that contrast the slowly built up centers. Other works have brightly painted lines outlining the central forms, clearly marking an interior and an exterior. For Baras, these borders are central to the work, holding and embracing it while defining its space and containing its meaning. The lines within them create further divisions, smaller units of detail and meaning that interconnect with one another.

Baras’ personal symbology considers the unconscious, architecture in relation to the body, and the strata of multiple histories. Shapes seem to suggest the human body, or fragments of the body, like footprints, eyes, or faces. The body is also present in the handling of paint and surface, in the many types of actions that the artist’s body takes to communicate these ideas: sewing, molding, dying, painting. Symbols address places and topographies that have personal meaning to Baras as well as imagined terrain.

The compositions are at once abstract and rooted in the material of life; they are fragments of a dream, half remembered but weighty with emotion.

Yevgeniya Baras (b. Syzran, former Soviet Union) is an artist based in New York. She has exhibited her work at the Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY); White Columns (New York, NY); The Landing Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); SOCO Gallery (Charlotte, NC); Nicelle Beauchene (New York, NY); Reyes Finn Gallery (Detroit, MI); Gavin Brown Enterprise (New York, NY); Inman Gallery (Houston, TX); Mother Gallery (New York, NY); Sperone Westwater Gallery (New York, NY); Thomas Erben Gallery (New York, NY); The Pit (Los Angeles, CA); as well as internationally including NBB Gallery (Berlin, Germany); Julien Cadet Gallery (Paris, France); Station Gallery (Sydney, Australia).

Baras' paintings take shape through a process of layering and accumulation, combining oil media with various found and unconventional materials. The resulting objects hover between painting and sculptural relief, with layers that frequently extend onto the sides and supports of the canvas, refusing any definitive boundary. Within these stratified compositions, Baras creates symbolic topographies which address ideas of language, migration, and translation. The material richness of the work serves to generate abstractions that are encoded and deeply personal.

Yevgeniya is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner grant in 2023 and 2018. Baras was named Senior Fulbright Scholar for 2022/2023. She was a recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 2021 and the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. Baras was selected for the Chinati Foundation Residency in 2018 and the Yaddo Residency in 2017. She received the Artadia Prize and was selected for the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program and the MacDowell Colony residency in 2015. In 2014, she was named a recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Emerging Artist Prize. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, LA Times, ArtForum, The New York Review of Books, and Art in America, amongst others.

Baras co-founded and co-curated Regina Rex Gallery in New York’s Lower East Side (2010-2018).

Baras holds a BA in Psychology and Fine Arts and an MA in Education from the University of Pennsylvania (2003) and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2007). She is represented by Sargent’s Daughters.