Barbara Madsen is an artist and Professor at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. Madsen’s practice is at the intersection of sculpture, prints, painting, ready-mades, photography, and painting. Her vast collections of industrial matter -- spark plugs, machine parts, welding masks, light switches, rubber, plastic, prosthetics, artificial eyes, toys and much more – serve as the stimulus for the work. Her work is riddled with skeptical questions about society, civilization and collapse. Who is the Guardian and who is the Barbarian? Who enters the gate and who’s banned? She aims to lift the lid off canonical hierarchical art forms and queer space. Her work is an ever-evolving quest that picks out and unravels a new thread about greed and power to see how far she can push farcical realities from the primitive to the futuristic. Her explosive use of color is in the service of creating awkward, ridiculously sublime sculptures-works and installations that seem to infect, corrupt, and devour the universe. Yet, seeks joy and sustenance to find balance in an absurd world. 

She has had solo exhitions theBlanc Gallery in NYC; Qi Fengge Musuem of Print History, Shenzen, China; MGalleries, NJ; New York Public Library, NYC; Scuola de Grafica, Venice, Italy; Sykes Gallery, PA; Lowry Lab Theater, MN; Palacky University, Czech Republic; Graphics Collective Gallery, Belgrade, Serbia; Recitation Gallery, DE; Pratt Studios Gallery, Brooklyn; Benedicta Art Center, MN; Sommers Gallery, MN; Minneapolis College of Art and Design, MN; and Tyler School of Art, PA, among others. Madsen has been included over 100 group exhibitions.

Madsen's works are in the collections of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco Museum of Art, Princeton University firestone Library, Swarthmore College, Lafayette CollgeLibrary of Congress, Dartmouth College, University of Sharijah: United Arab Emirates, Guanlan Print Museum, Shenzhen, China, New York Public Library, and the Amoco Corporation.