Over the course of his distinguished seven-decade artistic career, Bill Barrett has become legendary for exploring in his elegant and lyrical sculpture the interplay between positive and negative space in bronze and other metals, material one thinks of as static and inflexible. Additionally, Barrett is widely acclaimed for a singular level of technical mastery. His graceful sculptures coherently transform visual symmetry with improvisational sequences of gestural spontaneity and free-flowing movement. Paradoxically, for art rendered in the solidity of metal, Barrett’s work nevertheless calls to mind the fluidity of calligraphic strokes frozen in space and portray a dream-like sense of floating forms and emanating energy. His alluring constructions strike an exquisite balance between volume and space, light and shadow, organic intuition and tectonic invention. Barrett’s command of the formal relationships between these forces evokes a fluid choreography and reveals the consummate skill and unequaled vision of one of the foremost sculptors of our time. The energy of modernist gesture infuses his graceful, dance-like metal forms with an ironic spontaneity reminiscent of action painting and the improvisational spirit of Abstract Expressionism. For this reason, Barrett’s work manifests a striking quality of kinesis that manages to seem elegant and organic, despite the solidity of the metal medium. Art historian and critic Peter Frank has written about Barrett’s work noting that, "These sculptures are not bodies gesturing, they are the gestures themselves.” Like Rodin and Henry Moore before him, Barrett has created a body of bronze and steel sculpture that is both aesthetically innovative and technically virtuosic. His work exudes an energetic ecstasy of motion captured in bronze, a spirit of musical frolic that resembles the freedom and expressiveness of dance. In his words, Barrett seeks in his sculptures to “incorporate beauty of perfection and emotion; using uplifting forms toward harmony and assertiveness…I am in pursuit of a certain ‘life-spark’.” Barrett is also a painter, creating colorful abstract canvases that echo the calligraphic imagery and graceful gestures that appear in his sculpture. Irrespective of media, Barrett’s perspective about his work is simple: "[My artwork is] a vehicle through which my humanity communicates with the viewer’s. There is beauty in humanity—and art that reflects this beauty can elevate the quality of life.” As an iconic figure in American Modernist sculpture, Barrett is considered a leader in the second generation of American metal sculptors. His work has been highly influenced by that of predecessors such as David Smith, Henry Moore, and Arshile Gorky. He has been exhibiting his work since the mid-1960s and has been included in many museum exhibitions and international art expositions—the Whitney Sculpture Annual in 1970, Art Basel in 1989, the Tokyo Expo in 1990, and the Armory Show in New York in 1996, to name only a few. Barrett attended the University of Michigan from 1954 to 1960 and earned his BS and MS in Design and his MFA from the same institution. Barrett is well known for sculptures that range in size between monumental-scale to small tabletop, found in numerous private and public collections. His work is part of the permanent collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art; the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts; the Fine Arts Museum of Oklahoma City; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; the International Foundation Art Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria; the Albuquerque Museum of Art; the Utsukushi-ga-Hara Museum, Tokyo; Villa Haiss Museum für Zeitgenüssische Kunst, Zell Germany; and Runnymede Sculpture Farm, CA, among others. He is the subject of two monographs, Bill Barrett: Evolution of a Sculptor, by Philip Palmedo, published in 2003, and Bill Barrett Sculpture and Paintings to 2012 published in 2012. Barrett’s large-scale works are found in such notable sculpture parks as the Grounds for Sculpture in New Jersey, Pyramid Hill in Ohio, and Runnymede in California. Others works are installed on dozens of corporate, municipal, and university campuses, most recently at Oklahoma State University, the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and Iowa State University, among others.