Barry Barker had thirty years experience of working within the contemporary visual arts, as a curator, writer and director of both publicly and privately funded arts organisations. He worked with Nigel Greenwood and was exhibitions officer at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London and the John Hansard Gallery before becoming Director of the Arnolfini in Bristol 1986-1991, overseeing a refurbishment of the gallery. Following this, Barry Barker was briefly with the South Bank Centre before becoming a Director of the Lisson Gallery. His main areas of interest have been conceptual art and minimal and he had an influential role in many artists’ careers of the last thirty years, especially Anish Kapoor. In 1986, he was co-curator of “Falls the Shadow” with Jon Thompson at the Hayward Gallery.

He worked closely with three generations of artists on publications, exhibitions, film and video. As well as Kapoor, they included Marcel Broodthaers, Lawrence Weiner, Daniel Buren, Art & Language, Rebecca Horn, Richard Long, George Baselitz, Tony Cragg, Douglas Gordon and Christine Borland.