Barnaby Furnas

Barnaby Furnas was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1973. He earned a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1995 and an MFA from Columbia University in New York in 2000. Before his formal training, he worked as a graffiti artist, and that background carries into a signature technique: he makes his own paint by mixing pigment with urethane, producing surfaces that pool, spatter, and bleed in ways closer to fluid dynamics than to traditional brushwork.

His subject matter centers on scenes of graphic violence and emotional extremity, most often historical battle imagery drawn from the American Civil War and the Battle of Iwo Jima, along with recurring motifs of blood and water, as in his Red Sea series. In 2015, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis presented "Work in Progress: Barnaby Furnas," built around a monumental fifty-by-ten-foot painting titled The Last Flood, constructed and poured on site. He was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and has held solo exhibitions at venues including Anthony Meier Fine Arts in San Francisco and Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, which mounted his show "Frontier Ballads" in 2018. Furnas is represented by Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York and Victoria Miro in London. Marianne Boesky's own gallery biography describes him as based in Philadelphia, while older sources, including Wikipedia and the Lever House Art Collection, describe him as living and working in Brooklyn or New York City; the discrepancy in his current city of residence is unresolved in the public record.

Furnas has been treated as a significant figure in contemporary American painting since his inclusion in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and his work has since entered the permanent collections of the Whitney, MoMA, SFMOMA, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Lever House Art Collection. Critical writing on his practice tends to focus on the tension between his subject matter, often violent, historical, and collective in scale, and his invented, process-driven paint technique, which pushes his figurative battle and flood scenes toward abstraction. That combination has kept him a recurring subject for museum survey shows even as his secondary market has remained comparatively small.

Furnas's auction footprint is modest relative to his museum standing. His current confirmed auction high is Flood (Final), which sold for USD 33,020 against an estimate of USD 12,000 to 18,000 at Rago Auctions in Lambertville, New Jersey, in a Post-War and Contemporary Art sale in November 2025 (lot 211; exact sale day not confirmed). Artprice records roughly 175 auction appearances for the artist to date, with results concentrated in the low to mid five figure range and no confirmed six figure result. There is no catalogue raisonne; works should be verified through Marianne Boesky Gallery or Victoria Miro.

Furnas is an artist whose institutional credentials, museum collections spanning the country, a Whitney Biennial inclusion, and continuous gallery programming, are stronger and more consistently documented than his auction history. The public auction record is thin enough that any single result should be treated cautiously, and buyers should confirm both provenance and current representation directly with Marianne Boesky Gallery or Victoria Miro given the absence of a catalogue raisonne. Basic biographical details, including his current city of residence, are inconsistently reported across otherwise credible sources, which is worth keeping in mind when evaluating any secondary claims about the artist.