Art Basel Miami Beach 2025: NOVA Booth N3 | Karen Barbour & ektor garcia

Rebecca Camacho Presents is thrilled to debut at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025 with a two-person presentation of new works by Karen Barbour (b. 1956, San Francisco, CA) and ektor garcia (b. 1985, Red Bluff, CA); intergenerational artists whose practices draw from personal histories as well as histories of craft across varied media, relying upon similar conceptual and formal strategies.

Rooted in acrylic painting and mixed media, Karen Barbour produces exquisite maximalist works that are emboldened with bright colors, forms, collaged elements, and small gestural marks that fill the entire surface of the picture plane. Diagnosed in 2020 with temporal lobe seizures, Barbour’s imagery is deeply personal, incorporating visions seen during her seizures, as well as dreams, memories, and family folklore. Barbour’s works are frequently populated by figures, imagined landscapes, and armatures resembling vertical towers, vibrating with visual intensity. While all the pieces in the presentation were completed in 2025, many have been developed over a period of almost 40 years, as Barbour continuously repurposes work from her own oeuvre. This method of working allows her to prioritize a slow accumulation of color and forms through repetitive and unique gestures. The accumulative surfaces of her works are evidentiary, highlighting the entanglement of their own transformations with that of the artist.

A new suite of works by ektor garcia is in conversation with Barbour’s mixed media pieces. Differing from Barbour’s style and approach yet sharing a sense of tactility and embrace of traditional techniques and materiality, garcia’s accumulative practice encompasses textiles, ceramics, metalwork and found materials. His approach hinges on precise, repetitive gestures and patterns that coalesce into the crocheted pieces for which he has become well-known.

garcia’s works consist of small and large-scale crocheted compositions, singular objects, and expansive installations comprised of handmade and collected pieces from the artist’s archive. Patterns are intrinsic, providing structural strength and countering the fragility and vulnerability of the thin strands of beautifully wrought webs. Like Barbour, garcia is invested in ideas whose origins can be traced to grassroots artistic movements that prioritize working from memory and the subconscious as well as connection through intentional communities and familial kinship. garcia’s “portals” – sculptures comprised of crocheted copper wire and copper tubing or welded steel – are evocative of both permeability and connection. Comprised of strands of industrial copper wire woven together, they read as a delicate circuitry similarly to Barbour’s towers that radiate with magnetic intensity.