...moves between meticulous depiction and painterly abstraction, between love of and enthusiasm for nature and the feeling that “perhaps everything in the world is only a vehicle for shining and singing poetry...” (Valery Bryusov)

Already as a child, she would watch her mother, an academically trained painter, at work, and this imparted to her a first intimation of visual composition and the formal basics of drawing. Artistic understanding was thus passed on to her as a matter of course. After many years, she turned away from her earlier naturalistic approach, moving toward what one might call musical realizations – she uses the model provided by nature to develop her own artistic system, her own visual language.

Engaging in abstraction means making a choice, and thus bidding farewell to much that is “beautiful”. Good music tolerates no unnecessary tones! This takes courage and a calculating mind, but also sensitivity, because the decision regarding what should remain and what must go advances along a fine line of artistic feeling.

Barbara Holter has mastered the technique of painting in oils in an unbelievably short time, developing an artistic strength within it that would lead one to believe she had been working with it all her life – when actually she had almost never touched oil paints...

And yet she goes on and on, her palette, painterly gesture, ductus and compositional dynamism becoming richer with every painting, without losing decisiveness and exactitude of detail. I think that in the future the name Barbara Holter will be associated with an artistically independent, highly professional and self-assured painter.

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–  Ekaterina Walser-Vassilieva