FRANCES BARTH
DEEP BLUES
Winter 2020
FRANCES BARTH, Deepblues (2 panels), 2019 Acrylic on wood panel part carved 24h x 50w x 1.50d in. ( 60.96h x 127w x 3.81d cm) - FB105
Jack Whitten in his book "Notes from the Woodshed" (Hauser & Wirth publishers, 2018) refers to Frances Barth 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 terriffic at Susan Caldwell's. Frances is a good painter".
FRANCES BARTH Reflections-the Moon (3 panel triptych), 2018-19 Acrylic on wood panels, 24h x 92w x 1.50d in. (60.96h x 233.68w x 3.81d cm) - FB096
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."
“Barth is working to find a way to introduce non-specific narrative to abstraction while depicting fictive landscapes that allow the viewer to participate. In her work, Barth moves closer to and architectural and natural element in vast space.”
- Hamptons Art Hub, Art Unrestricted
FRANCES BARTH, A Tiny Pinch, 2017 Acrylic on gesso wood panel 24h x 36w x 1.50d in 60.96h x 91.44w x 3.81d cm FB099
© Photographie Valérie Gueit
FRANCES BARTH, Musician, 2018 acrylic on panel 24h x 36w in 60.96h x 91.44w cm FB093
Barth is a virtuoso of shifting spaces, gorgeous hues, and subtle surprises. A dedicated abstract painter fascinated by narrative, she is also a maker of award-winning digitally animated films and oblique graphic novels, both of which depend on fine line drawings. Barth’s profound knowledge of the highest of high modernist art coexists with a taste for cartoon-like simplifications and a deep appreciation of the banalities of the New Jersey streets where she lives and works. In her recent show, all of this magically came together. From a distance, her abstract canvases declared themselves in terms of unexpected color relationships and suave shapes calling tensely to one another. From a closer view, we were engaged by nuanced incidents of fragile, tremulous drawing, exquisite surfaces, and ravishing expanses of color, but we also discovered collaged digital fragments, most overtly in five related paintings intended to be read sequentially, like a wordless graphic story. Yet Barth’s classically harmonious canvases are also unsettling. Our relation to the paintings keeps changing. Now we hover at a great distance above them, now we are confronted by something vaguely perspectival, now two-dimensional structure dominates. Barth’s paintings demand that we read them slowly, the way we do complex seventeenth- century canvases, savoring the invigorating tug of war she establishes between assured abstraction and ambiguous, elusive narrative, between the hand and technology, and more.
- Karen Wilkin (The Hudson Review, January 31, 2018)
"... it's not an overstatement to say that Barth's paintings suggest new possibilities for what abstract painting can encompass in the first part of the 21st century."
- Karen Wilkin, 2008
"As with Thomas Nozkowski’s cryptic modes of abstraction, Barth’s uncertain terrain is precisely balanced between lucidity and mystery. An absorbing world of imagination might also be a quirky transcription of observable facts. With unerring color harmonics that are as sophisticated and seductive as those of any artist working today, Barth’s paintings are almost soothing despite their unsettled space.”
- David Brody, Artcritical December 2017)
FRANCES BARTH, Travels, 2012, Acrylic on three stretched canvas panels (the center one is 96" long) 18h x 156w in. ()45.72h x 396.24w cm- FB012
Frances Barth is a noted American artist and teacher who makes abstract paintings and videos. Frances was born in the Bronx, in New York City, and studied painting at Hunter College. She 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 (MoMA), 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, the Joan Mitchell Foundation grant in 1995, two American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase awards in ’99 and ’04, the "Anonymous Was a Woman grant" in 2006, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2017.
She is the Director Emeritus of the Mt.Royal School of Art, Maryland Institute. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1977.
