Javier Barrios

Javier Barrios is renowned for his signature, hallucinatory visual language, which he deploys across drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation. Embracing a multitude of influences and sources ranging from botany to mysticism, colonial history to myth-making, his work explores themes as universal as mankind’s position within nature, our relationship to death, and our systems of belief.

Using watercolour, pastel, oil, and sculpture, Barrios constructs intricate scenes in which flora mutate into seductive yet menacing anthropomorphic entities. His practice questions the complex relationship between humanity and the natural world, revealing how both exploitation and fascination underpin botanical colonialism. Among his many influences, Barrios acknowledges Buddhist hell scrolls, Japanese yōkai folklore, pre-Hispanic cosmologies, and the Mexican mural tradition.

Materially and conceptually, his work operates as a dialogue between past and present, colonizer and colonized, science and spirituality. Notably, the artist’s sculptural Haunted Houses – paper-clad reinterpretations of Victorian Wardian cases once used to transport exotic plants across empires – transform tools of colonial extraction into vessels of haunting and reparation. Through such prisms of botanical colonialism and extractivism, Barrios’ multifaceted works question our supposed importance within the world, staging counter-narratives where plants reclaim agency, bend and rewrite history.