057 Monolith VII

Baras’ work, made over a span of thirty years between 1980 and 2010 in New York, Connecticut and Southern France, was largely the output of a tenacious autodidact. Born in New York in 1930 to immigrant parents, Baras was raised and schooled in the Bronx. After attending City College, he joined the family business—a modest textile firm that relations insisted he run. After selling the company at a profit in 1974, Baras embarked on art making full time. He enrolled at the School of Visual Arts in 1979, where he received a BFA with honors. A lifetime of uninterrupted painting followed. Its productive joys were eventually cut short by Alzheimer’s, but not before the artist amassed a powerful body of pictographic canvases to rival those of art history’s most allusive minimalists.