Barbara Steinberg 'Age and Memory' An exhibition in aid of The Alzheimer's Society

UK based American artist, Barbara Steinberg has been active as a creative force for over fifty years now. In her long career, she has crossed paths with a number of important figures in the art world, including Frank Auerbach (for whom she sat) and Michael Ayrton (who she assisted) as well as witnessing various trends and movements – from Post Expressionism, Pop Art, Conceptualism and Urban Art. Through all of this, Barbara has always forged her own path, firstly in painting, then in sculpture. Over the past decade, she has returned to painting and this time round her work has a new intensity and depth. She is surely one of the most important abstract painters active in the UK at this time. Her work demands to be seen in the flesh, its beautiful vibrancy carrying all before it

Barbara’s new collection of work from 2012 is entitled ‘Age and Memory’. Executed in the run up to her seventieth birthday this year, the artist says she found herself dwelling very much on thoughts about ageing and in particular, how this process affects and changes over time, recollections of the our earlier selves. When we look back, Steinberg says, we see the past through many filters that have developed with years of experience. We are left with a very vivid impression of events and sensations, which is very much shaped by these filters. Some aspects of these memories, for example the facts, may become unreliable, but the artist believes that the more deeply engrained sensual memories, particular that of smells, but also of the visual and aural, come down through the years more intensely.

In the new work, a number of the pieces are framed with blocks of dark colour, giving the impression of looking through a window or a portal to something very distant and strange. All the works in the show do have a sense of perspective that draws in the audience and implies a narrative or the ghost of a narrative. While the works is definitely thoughtful and introspective reflecting the thought processes of the artist, it retains the signature bold palette that has always seemed so full of the unquenchable joy of living in the here and now.

In support of The Alzheimer’s Society there is an online auction featuring "Brightness Falls" inspired by Nashe's poem,"A Litany in Time of Plague."

The complete stanza is: “Beauty is but a flower/Which wrinkles will devour/Brightness falls from the air/Queens have died young and fair/Dust hath closed Helen's eye/I am sick, I must die/Lord, have mercy on us!"

The destruction of youth and beauty, the loss of powers and the fear of mortality are everyone's experience. In this painting, Barbara Steinberg has tried to embody that experience -- to imagine the warmth and light of youth, distanced, yet intensified, by the darkness and loss of age.


The Alzheimer's Society commits itself to maintaining, improving and promoting its unique knowledge and understanding of dementia. It seeks to define and develop quality in its activities and services, to be inclusive of all communities but in particular people with dementia, their families and the professionals who work with them and to work in partnership with other organisations which share its aims.