“Barbara Bachner at Gallery @ 49”
By Ed McCormack
Excerpt from “New York Notebook”, Gallery&Studio, Vol. 4 No. 4, New York, NY, April/May 2002

“Barbara Bachner is one of our most versatile and unpredictable artists, moving easily between visual and conceptual modes of expression, as in her recent mixed media installation "Camouflage, at Gallery@49, 322 West 49th Street. As the title indicates, the theme was concealment, subterfuge and hidden agendas, which Bachner explored through her use of a kind of camouflage material manufactured in East Germany during the Cold War, her own old, worn shoes, footprint reliefs on the gallery walls, and other odd elements which she layers or combines artfully How people dealt with the doomsday atmosphere of Cold War paranoia and how it is mirrored in our present post 9/11 anxiety goes hand-in-hand with gender issues expressed wryly through domed shoe sculptures, pink army boots, and other ominous/funny fetish objects and material metaphors. Barbara Bachner is an aesthetic provocateur who is not afraid to push your buttons—or even subvert your sense of humor—as long as she can make you think.”