Barbara Rogers, recently exhibiting paintings, drawings and mixed media graphics at the Michael Wallis Gallery, combines highly sophisticated techniques of painting, sensitive draftsmanship, and an extremely personal, perceptive wit in delightful, quasi-Surrealistic charades fusing social satire with subtleties of psychological mood. Egyptianesque hawk-headed people in cocktail party conversational stances and other playfully absurd zoocephalic humanoids populate Miss Rogers’ paintings and drawings; a lion-headed nude female figure, reminiscent of the Theban goddess Sekhmet, rendered in an ethereally diffused crepuscular opalescence of spray-painted, violet-tinged flesh-tones and posed in a tidy, domestic interior (viewed as though seen from without through a cage-like window) is designated as Trapped in Suburbia. The artistic sensibilities and technical facility and finesse lavished on these conceptions, together with their poetic metaphorical quality and their fragilities of wistful irony and urbane humor, endow them with an overall mood which seems to have an affinity with the mood of urban portrayals and drawing-room scenes in the early poems of T. S. Eliot.

—Palmer D. French