"When art is shown in Victorian warehouses instead of the familiar carpeted galleries of the West End, the result is often more satisfying. Rusting girders and crumbling plaster set off paintings as effectively as plush wall carpeting. Sue Barclay borrowed this space for three weeks between tenants; three years of work, much of it exploratory, her most recent paintings making the trip worthwhile. Built onto a framework of wild exxpressionism, large, simple compositions of foreground and a distant glow are worked up with intense attention to detail, Barclay spending hours scratching into a few square inches of the canvas. The late paintings of Turner spring immediatley to mind, though ostensibly abstract Barclay's paintings have the shadow of their Expressionist beginning lurking beneath their cultured surfaces like the figures that drown in Turner's wild seas. Turner's setting sun or snow storm become an intensifying glow in Sue's paintings, changes in hue cauding it to give both optimistic and pessimistic portent."
Mark Currah, Art Critic

"...go and see the shimmering, other-worldy abstractions of the young Scots artist Sue Barclay, whose show at the Stephen Bartley Gallery is her second solo-exhibiton since graduating from Byam Shaw in 1987. She is now working in two complementary directions: in the first group of pictures, she creates space-scapes of magical, vibrating colour emanating from one or two burning orbs; in the other she presents harder, more focused discs from which lines of light radiate. The soothing, ethereal quality of the first group contrasts with the icon-like stiffness of the second, but in both idioms, a meticulous, painstaking application of pigment results in quietly seductive surfaces. Here is a talent to watch."
David Cohen, Art Critic