Audrey Barcio, Sharp Curves October 3-31, 2025
Audrey Barcio, Power Exchange, 2025, Acrylic, Flashe, mica and18k gold on canvas. Image courtesy the aritst.
Available Space Art Projects presents Audrey Barcio’s solo exhibition Sharp Curves at Couch in the Desert on October 3-31, 2025. The artist will be presenting an artist lecture at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art on Thursday, October 2 at 7PM in the auditorium.
Artist Lecture: 7PM at the Marjorie Barrick Museum Auditorium
Opening Reception: Friday, October 3, 6-8PM at Couch in the Desert 1507 W. Oakey, Las Vegas 89102
Available Space Art Projects is pleased to present Sharp Curves, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Audrey Barcio. Continuing Barcio’s interest in abstraction and sacred geometry, this body of work is inspired by the equilibriums and tensions found at the intersection of the female form and fashion history.
Several works in the show are inspired by “bullet bras.” Emerging in the late 1940s and popular through the 1960s, these cone-shaped undergarments empowered women to control their form, adding structure to the body, uplifting the chest and echoing the pride with which women were defending their rights. The body being an ever-present battleground is made more apparent when the undergarments supporting politicized body parts take the shape of warheads. Barcio’s painting Power Exchange (2025) sharply exemplifies the shape of this tension; high gloss black paint collides with soft pink as strikes of gold illuminate the symbolic landscape, while triangles jutting across the canvas are dressed in metallic finery akin to lustrous satin.
Barcio’s painting Soft Core (2025) embodies the concept that the emotions we convey are circuited from the heart and projected from the chest; the sharpest edges emerge from the softest core. Its interplay between abstracted ripples — a dual sonic boom; a convergence of enrobed triads defying the oppositional noise — suggest the body parts closest to our center wait in shadow for recognition of the power they hold.
The pyramidal forms in Barcio’s new paintings also nod to the costumes Jean Paul Gaultier designed for Madonna’s Blond Ambition World Tour (1990). As depicted in the documentary Madonna: Truth or Dare, the first layer of confident assertion arrives with the singer on stage in the form of a pinstripe pantsuit with strategically sliced slits allowing for the pale pink stain tips of her cone bra to peek out from under before their grand reveal. In works such as Visible Lines (2025) and Sharp Curves (2025), Barcio unleashes the seams of the costume, laying bare in transsectional appreciation the multidimensionality of the garments and singer. Arrangements of vertical diamonds pierced with pearlescent tips call back to Gaultier’s design, while spiral stitches shaping the cup revert to their state as a pattern. While clothed in these bold accouterments, Madonna belted from her chest to the crowd the importance of “expressing yourself,” a rallying cry to defy definitions of masculinity or femininity, a call to equilibrium echoed in Barcio’s compositions.
Throughout the exhibition, Barcio expands her exploration of descendant and ascendant triangles as symbols of power. Exploring the rich tapestry of geometrical forms found in the body, these new works confirm the canonical contours of the chest are essential sources of vitality, whether armed with support or bare. -Lauren Vaccaro
Posted and published by Wendy Kveck on September 28, 2025.