Nature Remains

For more than forty years, Barbara Schreiber has created beautiful paintings about ugly realities. Much of her early work addressed social and political concerns, but more recently her paintings center on profound loss.         

Ever evolving as an artist, Schreiber presents a body of work in Nature Remains that signals a shift. The backdrops have become more atmospheric, indicating a move away from explicit storytelling. Balancing humor and dread, Schreiber’s paintings are deeply personal, yet speak to our shared anxieties about the current moment. Though rooted in environmental themes—especially the impacts of overdevelopment and habitat destruction—her paintings are also elegies about personal loss and emotional dislocation. What may have begun as meditations on extinction might also be portraits of heartbreak, or the slow unraveling of a life. While these works may appear simple at first glance, they are complex, meticulously painted reckonings about what is lost, what is threatened, and what remains.