At the core of this year's best-of artist's category is a loss: the death of our most stellar, the rising young artist Scott Barber. The Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell once said "art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it." It is a meager, dull and uninspired life without Barber and his art. He artfully deployed his private life in the public sphere, waging his battle with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma on the painterly surface. Though we know Barber for his lapidary painting, the faintly bubbled and brightly colored planes of the renderings of his cancer cells, he was a polymath when it came to artistic medium. He worked in video and sculpture, the virtual and the plastic. His three large, round urethane-cast wall pieces give light form in plastic hirsute bodies. In yellow, blue and red, they are the primary colors of Mondrian's palette translated into an electric light-swooning affair that is perfectly shagadellic. Barber died on April 22 from complications resulting from a bone-marrow transplant.
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