Barry X Ball (Pasadena, California, 1955) is an American artist who grew up in a family of fundamentalist Protestants. He graduated in 1977 from Pomona College in Claremont and moved to New York in 1978, a city where he still lives and works. His artistic research develops through a language that combines classical sculpture with the use of advanced technologies, such as 3D scanning, virtual modeling, and CNC milling, giving shape to works that unite artisanal craftsmanship with digital precision.

From his early gold-ground works of the 1980s to more recent series such as Portraits and Masterpieces, Ball works on the dialogue between past and present, reworking iconic works from the history of Western art with precious materials such as marble, alabaster, onyx, calcite, and lapis lazuli. The artist’s inspiration is suspended between a reference to the religious and classical figurative heritage and the urgency to reflect on the contemporary human condition. His religious background precisely influences his choice of subjects, which often refer to Christian iconography, reinterpreted with a visionary and technological approach.

The element of deformation—particularly in faces—represents for Ball a key point, going beyond citation and technique: the faces appear altered, fractured, at times unsettling, yet they remain alive, expressive, and charged with emotional tension. In this way, the artist moves sculpture from a purely mimetic or celebratory dimension toward an exploration of identity, trauma, and fragility. For many critics, his work represents an “algorithmic baroque” or a “digital neo-expressionism” for its ability to merge classical aesthetics and computational processes.

Barry X Ball’s work has been exhibited in prestigious international venues: from the Museum of Arts and Design and PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, to the Bass Museum of Art, SITE Santa Fe, Ca’ Rezzonico (on the occasion of the Venice Biennale), Magasin 3 in Stockholm, the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Museo Cantonale d’Arte in Lugano, the MART in Trento and Rovereto, to the Today Art Museum in Beijing, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, the Kunsthalle Krems, and Le Printemps de Septembre.

Among his most recent solo and group exhibitions are Barry X Ball: Remaking Sculpture at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas (2020), The Figure in Process: From de Kooning to Kapoor 1955–2015 at Pivot Art + Culture in Seattle (2015–2016), and Phantom Bodies: The Human Aura in Art at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville (2015–2016). In 2024, he participated in the group exhibition Pious & Profane at Patricia Low Contemporary in Gstaad, and in 2025 he presents the show The Last God at the Mario Diacono Gallery in Boston. Previously, in 2011, he exhibited in the show Portraits and Masterpieces at Ca’ Rezzonico, connected to the Venice Biennale.

His works are part of major museum and private collections, including those of the Hammer Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Norton Museum of Art, Collezione Maramotti, Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, FRAC Bretagne, Museo Cantonale d’Arte, MART of Trento and Rovereto, Collezione Berlingieri, The Olbricht Collection, and Collezione Panza.

Barry X Ball’s poetics look to ancient art without ever appearing irreverent: the artist states that he wants to “project into the contemporary what might appear to be a relic of the past.” His is a sculpture that celebrates, that seeks extreme emotions through hollowed forms and vibrant materials, opening up to a new conception of the portrait and the sculpted body. Each sculpture thus becomes an organism unto itself, autonomous in image and concept, suspended between memory and reinvention.

Curriculum Vitae