Since the late 1960s, the British-born artist Phyllida Barlow has experimented with non-traditional, modest materials like cement, fabric, plaster, plywood, and metal to create colossal sculptures and installations that occupy, challenge, and interrupt physical spaces. From her early memories of London’s war-ravaged East End to the unrelenting expansion and construction of the city in the twenty-first century, Barlow is inspired by the industrial urban landscape and its processes of damage and repair. Her enormous sculptural forms are stacked from floor to ceiling, giving the unnerving impression of being close to toppling over, and unexpectedly interspersed with vibrant colors. Their worn surfaces intentionally reveal the processes of their making, creating a thrillingly contradictory experience of physical threat and stability, of emotional alienation and connection. Shown drawing at her home studio and creating new, large-scale sculptures with her studio assistants, the artist is dedicated to pushing the formal and expressive power of her materials to create anti-authoritarian and anti-monumental objects. As Barlow puts it, “I’ve always been interested in the object that seems badly behaved.” Phyllida Barlow was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, in 1944. Inspired by the urban environment, Barlow’s sculptures marry unconventional materials such as cardboard, plywood, plaster, and cement with vibrantly colored paint and fabrics. Her invented forms are created through layered processes of accumulation, removal, and juxtaposition—gestures that Barlow describes as “more functional than artistic.” The resulting massive works challenge viewers’ experiences of physical space, stretching the limits of mass, volume, and height as they tower, block, and interrupt space. Yet these works remain distinctly anti-monumental; the artist leaves exposed, unfinished seams, revealing the means of the works’ making and playing with the tensions between hardness and softness, the imperious and the comic, and the painterly and the sculptural.