LONDON — When the artist Alvaro Barrington was coming up in New York’s 90s hip-hop scene, he and his friends obsessed over top five lists: “In the neighbourhood, all anybody talked about was, ‘Who’s the top five rappers? Who’s the top five in basketball? Who are the essentials?”
Seven years ago, Barrington swept onto the global art scene like a tropical storm — powerful and without warning — and that tempest has not stopped. Today, anyone writing a top five list of the most-compelling artists of the contemporary era would have to consider Barrington.
In both mentality and mien, he is a total New Yorker, but Britain became his launchpad. Barrington was 34 when he graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art – an age by which many of his peers had already peaked, first hyped and then crushed by an artworld that craves newness. He had never had a solo exhibition. Yet within a few years of Slade’s 2017 MFA show, he was seen by collectors and curators alike as one of the artworld’s greatest new talents, as wildly creative as he is intensely prolific.
Barrington’s network transcends the art world, where people refer to him simply as “Alvaro.” Three weeks ago, he was sitting front row at Chanel to watch the debut of Matthieu Blazy, a friend. He moves through glitzy crowds with quiet confidence, always a singular presence, his deep-ebony features quizzical and calm, until they break into an open smile.
Yet fame and financial reward are far less meaningful to him than legacy: true to his schoolyard obsessions, Barrington wants to be ranked among the 21st century’s top five painters. Of course, it’s too early — both in the century and in his career — to judge how that will play out.
Yet one thing is certain: Alvaro Barrington is a truly 21st-century artist — for the hip-hop mindset he brings to practice; the way in which he bridges art and other industries; his intense focus on staying true to his community, and the way he wrote his market’s rules.
Hustles and Epiphany
Born in Venezuela, Barrington came to Brooklyn with his mother at age eight and was raised all over New York City by relatives after she died of cancer two years later. Although he was always drawing, Barrington came to the art industry late. For one thing, art seemed less important to him than music and, in the world of hip-hop, graffiti artists had never really transcended their own culture, while rappers had reaped billions for music labels and become their own global brands.
For years, his main hustle was sourcing and selling designer clothes to his inner-city friends. He once posted that he brought Prada to Bed Stuy. But this was New York’s “Kids” era when rappers, painters, skaters, designers and models collided on the Downtown scene. And at some point, Barrington saw a future in art.
“I realised there was an art industry, with its own rules, but I had zero interest in not being myself,” he says. “So, I went to art school hoping to figure out how to get into the art industry, as an artist, without ever losing who I was.”
His BFA, at the public Hunter College in New York, took him seven years. Sometimes studying part-time, he racked up more than twice the number of credits necessary to graduate — and $270,000 in student loan debt. “If an artist I liked mentioned Foucault or international affairs, I felt I had to go and study French philosophy or political science,” he explains. “I had the unusual ability to go and listen to lectures for 10 straight hours.”
Barrington studied artists most closely and, in a sense, it was the American painter Philip Guston who brought him to London. Influential professor Katy Siegel told him he needed to leave the New York bubble to grow as an artist. And when Barrington came to London for his admissions interview at Slade, his side mission was to visit Piero della Francesca’s mid-15th century masterpiece “The Baptism of Christ,” and Paulo Uccello’s “The Battle of San Romano,” because he had read about Guston making precisely the same pilgrimage.
“I flew to London. I did my interview. I walked down to the National Gallery. I looked at Piero and Uccello. And that was it,” Barrington recalls. “I thought if I could understand both these paintings, in the way that Guston understood them, then I could become a painter in a real way.”
Living in London, Barrington revisited “The Baptism of Christ” every week, studying it intently. After a few months, he had an epiphany: the painting centres stillness. “I felt like Neo, finally seeing the Matrix,” he says. That unlock gave him access to Guston, Morandi, De Chirico and others. Barrington dove into multiple bodies of work, unleashing a momentum that led to his art world breakthrough — and still carries him forward today.
Figuration dominates his work, though he’s not afraid to go abstract-adjacent. The figures depicted can be anonymous, but he’s also featured Grace Jones, Rihanna, various rappers, and the Jordan-era Chicago Bulls. He occasionally visually name-checks Basquiat.
Though he’s commonly called a painter, Barrington also makes dynamic large scale sculptures, often deploying industrial materials tied to New York and the Caribbean. If there’s one unifying factor, it’s the atmospherics. His work is vibrant and visceral, precise but never precious in its use of materials and imagery. Every one feels profoundly alive.
Barrington’s current art world presence is impressive: last year, for example, he was awarded the prestigious Tate Britain Duveen Galleries Commission, taking over the main artery of the building. The painter and sculptor has shown with many of the world’s top galleries, from Sao Paulo to Seoul, his work regularly selling for six-figure sums. What’s perhaps most remarkable, however, is how he has handled that success, using a creative flywheel and a novel market strategy to make sure it doesn’t take him under.
The Seven-Year Storm
Legendary London gallerist Sadie Coles first met Barrington in 2016 during one of seven visits the artist made to a show by Coles-repped painter Laura Owens, who taught him at Hunter. Soon after, as always, Coles went to Slade’s annual MFA show. “Alvaro was the absolute standout,” she remembers. “I loved the energy and wanted to work with him immediately.”
But when Coles called Barrington to propose that they work together, he told her that he was already in conversations with both the fast-rising East End gallery Emalin and the established South Bank gallerist Tommaso Corvi-Mora. Rather than choosing between them, Barrington told Coles, he would like to work with all three, and soon. The proposition was a rupture with art market protocol. As a rule, artists are represented by a single gallery per city, or even per continent. Given her international standing, working solely with Coles would have been the unquestionably “correct” choice. But the gallerist was intrigued by Barrington’s stance. “I called Tommaso and we talked about it,” Coles says. “And then I said, ‘Why not?’”
Barrington’s first solo exhibition was not at a gallery, though; it was at MoMA-PS1 in New York, curated by Klaus Biesenbach, not long after that 2017 MFA show. The next year, he showed with Emalin and a fourth London gallery, the Dover Street outpost of the Austrian titan Thaddaeus Ropac. Barrington made his debut with Coles in 2019 and the year after that with Corvi Mora. In 2021, he went into post-pandemic overdrive, showing with Emalin, Coles and Ropac in London, plus a New York show with the Black gallerist Nicola Vassell, who had just opened her gallery after many years working with major galleries and helping Swizz Beatz build his Dean Collection.
The painter brought his polygamous market approach to Manhattan in 2023, showing with established gallerist Anton Kern (the son of star German painter Georg Baselitz), the hard-charging younger gallery Karma, and again with Vassell. In short, since he sprinted out of the starting blocks, Barrington hasn’t really stopped running.
The flurry of solo shows, magazine features, residencies and prizes put him under an enormous pressure to produce. Funded by his strong market, he built up an infrastructure allowing him to embrace his constant stream of opportunities.
Three years ago, Barrington bought a four-story former community centre on Whitechapel Road, sited squarely in the middle of the East End art scene. Within a half-mile radius lie internationally active galleries such as Maureen Paley, Carlos Ishikawa, and Herald Street, plus newer names such as Emalin, Soft Opening and Ilenia, not to mention the studios of many artists, like fellow star painter Issy Wood.
The building houses his studio, where his team works with him to produce new works, and coordinate the wider range of cultural activities Barrington is engaged with. The vibe there is loose, friendly, highly focused. It feels like a workshop, with materials — rope, canvas, paint, corrugated metal — covering the floors and the walls. He’s clearly not delegating off production; last week during Frieze he was pulling all-nighters in the studio.
As a rule, this kind of art market dynamic leads to work that soon comes to feel repetitive at best, but more often exhausted or mediocre. While collectors vie for spots on the gallery waiting lists, the artist runs out of energy and ideas. At some point, things go pear-shaped. Yet almost a decade after Barrington’s epiphany, his work continues to surprise. His drive is unabated
How does the artist keep the creative flow?
“Alvaro has a diligent curiosity about him,” says Los Angeles art critic and writer Janelle Zara. “The first time we met we spoke for hours, about art history, pop culture, his personal history, politics, economics. These are all things he synthesises in his work. You can see the same curiosity in his endless exploration of materials.”
Zara first met Barrington when he came to Los Angeles for a 2022 Blum and Poe show, where Ghostface Killah of the Wu-Tang Clan performed, HOT-97 radio DJ Angie Martinez interviewed Barrington, and he curated a parallel exhibition of Caribbean artists. Having followed his work closely since then, she observes: “One show can look completely different from the next. He’s perpetually seeking new ways to express an idea, but the overall throughline in his practice is that it’s all deeply embedded in his lived experience.”
Similarly, Coles describes Barrington as an intellectual magpie, constantly on the lookout for new ideas that he incorporates into his work. But she also points to the generative power of constant self-reflection. “Alvaro has a lot to say because he’s constantly working things through, and he dives in deep, so his pool of ideas is always being fed,” Coles says. “He’s a Black artist, constantly questioning how to connect to established art history, which has traditionally been very white. He’s always asking himself what that means, but also how he can get his community to see themselves in his work.”
When I raise the issue of burnout with Barrington himself, he smiles and pulls out his phone, saying, “I have over 100 different bodies of works in here, created by changes in materials, changes in conceptual pressures, what part of my life I’m trying to deal with, who I’m trying to speak to, who are its heroes. Being an orphan meant I had to go to different homes, all of them run by people who really, really loved me. But I had to live by different rules in each home while still being me. They each had different ways of seeing the world. I talk to Auntie Selda a certain type of way, about certain things, but I could talk to Auntie Joan and Auntie Heather in different ways.”
At one level, Barrington classifies every painting in a binary way: it either contains “room” to expand from or “no room,” meaning it is a dead end. (He thinks he got the idea from American painter Robert Ryman.) Coming out of Slade, he had a dozen bodies of work with “room,” each of which he felt could yield 20 years of exploration.
“There was always a plan, because right from the start Alvaro very consciously gave each gallery a different body of work, to give a clear identity for each gallery and also so that each of us has a coherent thread in our relationship with him,” Coles says. “I got Hibiscus and landscapes tied to his Caribbean biography and to Notting Hill Carnival.”
Barrington’s connection to the carnival, the signature event of London’s Windrush Caribbean community, runs deep. For the last five years, he has funded a float featuring his work and music from musicians with whom he’s become close since moving to London. It’s not a lark; during Frieze Week, by far London’s busiest annual art moment, Barrington took a half-day out to meet with the Notting Hill planning council to discuss the 2026 carnival.
Music Reigns Supreme
Barrington has a transversal relationship with culture — he’s curious about many fields and has collaborated with a wide range of creators. He’s close with fashion designers such as Blazy and Martine Rose. Only a poster for Lars von Trier’s furore film Dogville hangs in his office, and in conversation he often references movies and television.
But music remains by far the form he’s closest to. Why? “I think music is one of the only few places that still reflects where culture is… most industries trade on legacies of culture,” he recently posted to Instagram. It’s also down to music’s unparalleled ability to pull people together into physical spaces.
Three years ago, Barrington staged a rave at Corsica Studios in London’s Elephant and Castle area, the night of his opening at the Corvi-Mora gallery. The party was a gender-fluid, musical genre-bending event, one of the most diverse and vibrant that I’ve seen in three decades of art world nights. Toward the end of the rave, Barrington pulled me aside and said, “I want to do something in Miami, during Art Basel. Can you connect me with some good Miami people, people there who can get things done fast?”
Oil, acrylic, Flashe and enamel on burlap
145 x 165 x 5 cm. (Courtesy/Thaddaeus Ropac)
Fast-forward six weeks and across the Atlantic to Miami’s Little Haiti neighbourhood and nearly a million dollars worth of fresh Barrington paintings were hanging in the humid air of an open garage, with no visible security. Across the street, at a pizza joint owned by long-time Miami scene-maker Max Pierre, legendary New York DJ Stretch Armstrong was spinning old-school tracks. Barrington called it “The Rally.” One night, the place got so packed that dancers spilled into the street, doing a Miami-style Electric Slide. And then, like all the best parties, it got shut down by the police.
Even today, as a full-fledged art world celebrity, Barrington still views music as the apex art form, and hip-hop as the last great American Renaissance, saying he feels blessed to have been so fully formed by growing up in its culture: “I love Picabia, I love Picasso. Tracy Emin is a hero of mine. Artists like Nari Ward were very important influences. But at the same time, I’m not going to act like Kanye isn’t the most important artist of the last 40 years.”
Social Media, Served Raw
Barrington is a highly physical person. His hand remains in all his work. In a crowd, he’s jovial, engaging with people. But he also has a strong virtual presence on Instagram. Like many artists, Barringon’s Instagram usage goes beyond his own work; he also posts about pop culture icons such as Serena Williams and Tina Turner, for example.
What obsesses the art world, however, are his texts on Instagram Stories. They are visually barebones, always the same white type on a black background. Punctuation rules go largely ignored. Usually addressing politics, the art world, society, or how they intersect, they are stream-of-consciousness, often emotionally raw, like this: “People asking me to be mediocre really upsets me it sits with me days and weeks sometimes years i think why why do they hate me why do they think i should be mediocre so they feel more comfortable with me.”
Barrington doesn’t re-read texts before posting them. Sometimes he corrects himself a few minutes later with another post.
Zara views Barrington’s social media activity as part of his artistic process: “You can read his Instagram Stories and watch him thinking out loud. As an artist he’s always ideating, and not afraid to do so in public. They might be thoughts related to a specific piece he’s working on, or one of many recurring lines of inquiry that guide his overall practice.”
The Stories keep him honest, Barrington says, because they are read by his pre-fame friends and family. Growing up in the Obama era, he says, he felt confronted by the assimilated archetype: “You got to be the Harvard-educated Black person who’s properly spoken. But that’s not my story. And I have this anxiety that somebody will put that story on me, and that will erase my mother, and that will erase my brother, and that will erase every person who sacrificed for me.”
Last year, in the run-up to his May 2024 Tate Britain commission, Barrington broadcast on Instagram the process and the pressure he was feeling. Three months out, he wrote: “I’m very excited about the Tate show… its not quite there a lot of small decisions need to be figured out but it feels cohesive and real which was a journey for me when i got the offer.”
As the opening approached, he wrote, “My anxiety was sooo wild the last few days but last night i looked at tracey emins everyone i slept with 1963–1995 and i feel free again ima go listen to some 94 Biggie.” A week later, he posted, “I pray we all live to be a real and not an advertisement.”
In the Tate Britain’s August Duveen Galleries, Barrington presented a group of towering Caribbean figures against canvas backdrops, a corrugated tin roof with the soundtrack of rain above it plus paintings and sculptures. Notoriously rigorous Guardian critic Adrian Searle gave it four stars, writing, “Like carnival itself, everything feels loose and improvised and assured, a clamour of touches, moods and modes. Barrington’s commission evokes his origins and his journey to be here now. It is full of life.”
Barrington was harsher. A month later he took the unprecedented step of publicly criticising his own major show, mid-run no less. On Instagram he posted: “I think the show at the tate is a solid C+ im just getting out of my funk …. im glad i read audre lorde poetry is not a luxury … i think if i read before i would have made better decisions.” He felt the Tate work lacked brutality and honesty, In retrospect, Barrington says, he and others around him had “blocked” the work, making it less true to himself.
“When you want to be the best, it means you want to be the best version of yourself,” he explains. “If you’re Biggie, you want to be the best version of Biggie. You can’t be Tupac. I think the most valuable part of art is that you have to be honest about who you are. Arthur Jafa is extremely honest. Peter Doig, Basquiat, Frida Khalo, all of those artists…. I’ve been privileged to enter into a field where the one thing you can’t do is lie.”
Having learned from the Tate Britain experience, he’s currently working to exhibit across three continents: a commission for New York’s High Line, a solo booth with Coles at the inaugural Art Basel Qatar next year and his solo show at Ropac’s Salzburg gallery.
In April, he posted, “My hope for my art is that it becomes a global subculture,” citing Wu-Tang Clan as a model. At this rate it seems only a matter of time.Because in an era when artists operate like brands, brands seek cultural authenticity and vulnerability goes viral, Barrington’s new model feels perfectly tuned for the moment.
Learn more about Alvaro Barrington’s radical art practice when he takes the stage for a conversation with Marc Spiegler at BoF VOICES 2025, our annual gathering for big thinkers now in its tenth year. We have a limited number of invitation-only tickets to join us in person for our special 10th edition at Soho Farmhouse in Oxfordshire. To request an invitation, please complete this form.
Read “Rethinking the Art World,” a four-part series rolling out this week, examining how the sector is being reshaped by new power centres, new forms of patronage, new approaches to creativity and the epic battle between Sotheby’s and Christie’s.
Plus, subscribe to High Margin, a weekly newsletter by Robert Williams on creativity and business in the world of luxury — from fashion and watches to art, wellness, travel and more.