From the May 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here . Alvaro Barrington hasn’t slept much.
His gallery assistant, Natalia Grabowska, warns me of this as she’s showing me around his studio. ‘He’s a bit sleep-deprived today,’ she says. ‘He goes into beast mode, where he likes to sleep here and work for hours and hours – it’s never-ending.
’ When, half an hour later, Barrington welcomes me into his office at the top of his studio building, I see what Grabowska means. He’s wearing a sweatshirt, jogging bottoms and rubber loafers in the shape of frogs. ‘The past week I’ve been here and that has been my bed,’ he tells me, pointing to the brown leather sofa behind me, which is piled high with unidentified fabrics.
He sits on an office chair next to his computer, a window behind him looking out on the studio garden and a work in progress leaning against the wall: a canvas of about a metre square, covered in little patches of brown and green yarn that he says is inspired by the colours in his garden. I ask him why he’s been sleeping in his studio when he lives just down the road. ‘If I could be in my studio 24/7 I would,’ he says.
He looks deadly serious. Tupac Bather, Oct 2023 (2023; detail), Alvaro Barrington. Photo: Charles Duprat; courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London, Paris, Salzburg, Seoul; © the artist By the end of the interview I feel that, if I were given a proper bed, I too wouldn’t mind spending most of my time here.
Barringto.
