Richard Barnes | The Marble Mountain: Extraction and the Sublime

Richard Barnes | The Marble Mountain: Extraction and the Sublime
Inaugural Solo Exhibition in Vancouver
November 7-28, 2026
Main Gallery
3045 Granville Street
Opening reception: Saturday, November 7, 2-4 pm | Artist in Attendance

Bau-Xi Vancouver is proud to announce The Marble Mountain: Extraction and the Sublime, the inaugural solo exhibition in Vancouver by award-winning New York based photographer Richard Barnes. This body of work is an examination of the sobering effects of long-term resource extraction, as well as a timely questioning of the role of robotics and AI in the realm of art reproduction and cultural consumption, captured in a series of astonishingly beautiful images.

Artist Statement:

For the past few years I have been photographing in the quarries of northern Italy. As a photographer focused on the built environment, my work in the quarries emerges from a deep interest in land use and mineral extraction. The Apuan Alps which straddle both northern Tuscany and Liguria have been mined, exploited, and industrialized for over two thousand years, all to supply the world with one of the most exquisite strains of pure white stone, often simply referred to as Carrara marble. To say that this landscape has been scoured and abraded, sometimes beyond recognition, would be an understatement.

In addition to this environmental degradation I have also turned my attention to the workshops and sculpture studios that are currently undergoing profound transformation in terms of new tools employed in the carving of marble into sculpture using digital and robotic technologies. On a macro level, looking through an art historical lens, my images of the quarries depict what might be considered the largest and longest-running land art project ever conceived. At the same time, it represents the environmental degradation of an entire ecosystem, the cumulative effect of centuries of relentless extraction.

On a micro level, my work focuses on a specific strain of Carrara marble known as statuario — the marble of statues. Prized by artists for its luminous whiteness and high tensile strength, statuario allows for a polished finish of exceptional depth and luster. It is the marble that artists, especially Michelangelo, sought out for some of their most ambitious works. Closely associated with this region, Michelangelo spent extended periods of time in Carrara and on the Ligurian coast, returning year after year in search of the perfect blocks to ship to Florence or Rome.

More than merely selecting stones, Michelangelo lived among and supervised the cavatori (quarrymen), built roads, and devised more efficient means to transport the marble down from the mountains to the port of Luni for shipment. Remarkably, all of this took place before he ever touched chisel to stone. My photographic project looks beyond traditional hand-carved sculpture as it is still produced in the workshops of northern Italy, and its transformation in light of new technologies and digital advances, including robotic carving and AI modeling. Whereas Michelangelo and other artists of his era may have had legions of apprentices to assist them in their studios, realizing a single monumental sculpture could still take years to complete. Now, using robots, working night and day without the need of rest or food, a sculpture might be finished in a matter of days or weeks.

My work questions what happens to the creative process when time is compressed and a work of art is realized via a digital scan, then carved by a machine. What is lost in the production of a work of art when the artist is removed from the equation and a robot takes over? And what happens when a sculptor is no longer responsive to the geological aberrations, the flaws, or nuances in a block of stone that might cause him or her to alter the course of a carving or abandon it altogether, when control is given over to a machine?

-Richard Barnes, 2026


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