Barbara Grad (born 1950) is an American artist and educator, known for abstract, fractured landscape paintings, which combine organic and geometric forms, colliding planes and patterns, and multiple perspectives.

[11] Grad's work is noted for its loose, painterly invented spaces, lush color, and ability to conjure wide-ranging allusions to land and seascapes, urban sprawl, or ecological concerns.

[12][2][13][14] In 2018, critic John Yau wrote that Grad's "patterns and striations evoke watery reflections and geological strata, tilled land and strip mines, without shedding their identity as abstract, painterly marks.

When she tired of small-town life in 1979, she moved into a cheap loft in the "flower district" on the outskirts of current-day Chelsea in New York City, continuing to exhibit in Chicago and nationally.

[20][17] She generally rejects explicit imagery in favor of invented spaces that she creates with paint and color, which serve as metaphors for the complexity and instability of experience, culture and the environment.

The imagery found its way into her work—and continues to—in ribbon-like bands of modulated color and patterning that suggested landscapes and plant forms, which she sometimes combined with geometric shapes, as in the painting, Trails (1978).

[8][24][25] She unified the compositions by overlaying heavy, map-like white and black line work suggesting tendrils, vessels and honeycombs, which brought the organic forms into focus.

[26] Her drawing exhibition at Bernard Toale (2000) featured painterly watercolor and ink works on mylar and paper, that mixed text, abstract shapes and a detailed, "secret" visual language reminiscent of Klee or Miró.

[27] Cate McQuaid called it "meaty, satisfying work" that unpeeled like onion skins to reveal layers of subtle, translucent organic forms and ideas involving spirituality and consciousness; others described the pieces as challenging "koans" enacting an uneasy truce of nature and geometry.

[28][27] In the Boston Center for the Arts traveling group show "Standing on One Leg" (2005–8), Grad exhibited mixed-media works, such as Balancing Balls (2005), and incised etchings on plexiglass.

[8] Between 2002 and 2004, she created a socially oriented series of books, including Random Data and Enemy Territory (made as America entered the Iraq War), that incorporated abstract heads and figures, text, numbers, and diverse forms and materials such as eggshells and boots.

[16][34][35] Grad's later paintings have grown more dizzying, disorienting, dense, and expansive in their themes, which reference topography, maps, city grids and borders, the built environment, ecology, and the layering of cultures, one upon or next to another (e.g., Erosion, 2008; Greenspace, 2009;[36] Re-Build, 2012[37]).

[4][21][17] They situate them alongside cultural representations such as the Nazca Lines of Peru, Serpent Mound in Ohio, or crop circles reflecting the "ancestral need to take a bird's-eye view, the better to locate oneself on the planet.

[12][38] John Yau relates Grad's carefully developed, "splintered pictorial space" and ability to maintain a continuous tension between defined sections and the overall image to the abstract landscapes of Richard Diebenkorn.

[1] Others cite the tangled abstractions of Terry Winters, but note in Grad's flitting between the tangible and evanescent, a greater emotional register that expresses the difficulty of navigating complex communication, geographic and psychological divides.