On September 17, 2026, Lévy Gorvy Dayan will open Inma Barrero: MOTHERS, the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery. The presentation brings together eight large-scale sculptures, each on view for the first time, that represent a different maternal presence informed by prehistoric, ancient, and modern worlds across global continents. The sculptures come together to create, in Barrero’s words, a “chorus” of mother figures, “bearing witness and answering one another across the room.”
The basis of Barrero’s work is the handmade ceramic bead, with hundreds of beads joining to create a single sculpture. The beads take their inspiration from divine and universal sources, from the artist’s memories of her grandmother’s rosary to Greek komboloi (worry beads), and Buddhist prayer beads, which she encountered while living and working in Kyoto. To form the beads, she employs unconventional combinations of porcelain, earthenware, and terracotta, as well as soils from Japan, Mexico, and Spain to “unite different sources of earth in the figure of the mother.” She merges these with different glazing techniques and links or “weaves” the beads with metal wire, an homage to two forms of ceramic repair—the Spanish lañado, which restores ceramics with metal bindings or lañas—and the Japanese kintsugi, which mends breakages with lacquer dusted with powdered metals, such as gold.
Lévy Gorvy Dayan