Frances Barth Art

Frances Barth is a well known and respected Artist. She is the recipient of the prestigious Award: ANONYMOUS WAS A WOMAN (AWAW) that she received in 2006. And she is in prestigious Museum Collections (see below) The artist works here with the architectural use of colour blocking. The sweeping perspective is expressed through the extreme horizontal form. The work is predominantly grey and navy - with a shot of pink and yellow. Frances Barth work includes a linear narrative, almost like a creation story, over a period of geological time. She has pushed her painting into a realm between landscape, mapping and abstraction. The light in the paintings acts as phenomenon, and at the same time the abstract color creates an experience of light and place. FRANCES BARTH (American, b. 1946, lives and works in New Jersey) Jack Whitten in his book "Notes from the Woodshed" (Hauser & Wirth publishers, 2018) refers to Frances Bath as "a good painter"[...] "I like her triangles - they remind me of my use of the triangle as an image other than the pure geometry of the form". (p. 71) and then later again on p. 76: "Frances Barth's paintings were just terrific at Susan Caldwell's. Frances is a good painter”. Frances Barth was born in the Bronx, New York, and studied painting and art history at Hunter College, CUNY. Frances Barth is a noted American artist. She makes abstract paintings and videos. Barth has exhibited her paintings widely in both solo and group exhibitions since the late 1960’s, and her work is represented in numerous public, corporate and private collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum, in NYC, The Dallas Museum of Art, TX, The Albright Knox Museum, Buffalo. Frances showed six of her paintings in the 2015 Venice Biennale at the Palazzo Grimani in "Frontiers Reimagined". Her awards include The National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1974 and 1982, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1977, an Adolphe and Esther Gottlieb Individual Support Grant, the Joan Mitchell Foundation grant in 1995, two American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase awards in 1999 and 2004, the Anonymous Was a Woman grant in 2006 (AWAW), and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2017. Frances Barth's accomplished paintings are wholly individualistic and other than to say they are "radical abstractions" (Karen Wilkin), they are eccentric enough to elude classification. Barth refers to aspects of her work as a combination of comic restraint and purist abstraction. Combining contradictory elements of local color with abstract color, vocabularies of both painting and drawing, disorienting spatial relationships, Barth creates works that are as provocatively ambiguous as they are soothingly beautiful. In her desire to "tell stories without words" Barth implies narratives and geographies in a realm between landscape, mapping and abstraction. The narratives in the paintings are stories taking place over a period of geological time, with references both topographic and tectonic, alluding to simultaneous multiple histories. The light that Barth creates within her paintings is a spell-binding presence that shifts the picture plane into a deep dimensional space at the same time that her compositional shifts in scale destabilize. Speaking on her use of color the artist refers to her desire to create "big areas of ungracious color - chemical color that doesn't exist in nature - to open up like the sky but not be sky." "... it's not an overstatement to say that they (Barth's paintings) suggest new possibilities for what abstract painting can encompass in the first part of the 21st century." - Karen Wilkin, "Frances Barth" (catalog) 2008, Sundaram Tagore Gallery. Early in her career, Frances also performed with Yvonne Rainer and Joan Jonas...