Artwork
Biography
“A love letter to women, written in ink. New myths of beauty, power, and survival.”
Siena Barnes
Born in London in 1982, Siena Barnes is a self-taught artist with familial understanding of the gallerist world. Primarily a draughtsman, Barnes works in an immediately recognisable style that combines eloquent line, graphic figuration, and drips of abstraction.
In her own words, Barnes describes her practice as “A love letter to women, written in ink”, where she explores beauty and liberation through a contemporary feminist lens, to refocus agency and self-preservation.
Inspired by folklore and a plethora of popular culture references, Barnes celebrates the muse as the myth-maker. Her subjects are of Outlaw Feminists, and women who live by their own rules. These figures form an aesthetic of survival, where glamour becomes a tool of resistance and self-possession.
Since 2019, Barnes has collaborated with Japanese fashion house Hysteric Glamour. Her work has been on exhibition internationally, including shows in Tokyo, Nashville, London and Berlin; her work has also been collected by prominent institutions worldwide, such as the Tom of Finland Foundation, Los Angeles.
“When life becomes unsatirisable, the smartest artists lean in rather than fall down. At first blush, Barnes’ illustrations are as logo-like and dexterously seductive as the forms they are critiquing… These are advertisements for sex and death, which is to say that they are like all other advertisements as viewed through the glasses from ‘They Live‘.”
Philippa Snow
Image credit:
Barry Adamson, Exhibition Space at Wishless Gallery, Tokyo, 2023
