Barbara Rossi (September 20, 1940 – August 24, 2023) was an American artist, one of the original Chicago Imagists, a group that in the 1960s and 1970s turned to representational art.
This more internally-focused work shifted to a more external viewpoint in the late 1970s, when she began representing situational images and whole figures.
In 1983, Rossi started traveling to India and making elaborate colored pencil drawings with Persian and Indian themes.
[9] Many people thought of Rossi's art as odd and grotesque[citation needed], and most of her paintings appear to be body parts from the inside out, often looking like knobs or folds of skin.
[10] Ken Johnson calls her paintings "X-rays revealing subdermal viscera," which he suggests resemble "churning inner souls".