Inma Barrero: MOTHERS at Lévy Gorvy Dayan

Inma Barrero, a Spanish-born artist who lives and works in New York, is showing MOTHERS at Lévy Gorvy Dayan on the Upper East Side. It is her first exhibition with the gallery. The show is on the fifth floor at 19 East 64th Street and closes October 17.

Barrero was born in 1969 in Almendralejo, Spain. Her practice spans sculpture, installation and sound, and it is grounded in ceramics. She turned to clay in the early 2000s, around the time she became a mother. Womanhood, motherhood, community, and the acts of making and repairing run through her work. Recent exhibitions include the Monastery of Panagia Evangelistria on Skiathos (2026), Kyotographie in Kyoto (2023 and 2025) and Instituto Cervantes in New York (2023). Her work is in the collections of the Hispanic Society Museum and Library in New York and the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, DC.

The exhibition presents eight large sculptures, all shown for the first time. Each embodies a different maternal presence drawn from prehistoric, ancient and modern cultures across the continents. Barrero describes the group as a "chorus" of mothers that bear witness and answer one another across the room.

Every sculpture is built from hundreds of handmade ceramic beads. The bead draws on her grandmother's rosary, Greek komboloi and the Buddhist prayer beads she encountered while living in Kyoto. She combines porcelain, earthenware and terracotta with soils from Japan, Mexico and Spain, joining different earths in the figure of the mother. The beads are linked with metal wire, a nod to two repair traditions: Spanish lañado, which mends ceramics with metal staples, and Japanese kintsugi, which uses lacquer and powdered metal.

Barrero works without sketches, and the names come after the forms. Pachamama has a triangular composition that recalls the Virgin Mary. The reclining Tellus echoes art-historical odalisques. Ataecina rises from the floor like an excavated figure. The other works are Genetrix, Melaina, Melissae, Hariti and Isis. All date from 2023–26 and range from about 1.8 to 2.7 meters in height or length.

A sound piece, The Mothers' Voice (2026), plays in the gallery. Barrero made it with Yannick Paget and Yumiko Tanimura. It combines the sound of the ceramic beads touching with Tanimura's voice over a seascape.