FRANCES BARTH: A PAINTING CONVERSATION 55 YEARS
RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION 1970-2025
25 April - 6 June 2025
This exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by Karen Wilkin, and a memoire by Frances Barth.
447 SPACE Chelsea New York

Jack Whitten in his book "Notes from the Woodshed" (Hauser & Wirth publishers, 2018) on p. 76 says: "Frances Barth's paintings were just terrific at Susan Caldwell's. Frances is a good painter".
Karen Wilkin in the Catalogue Essay she wrote for the exhibition describes Barth as a painter …”hors catégorie”. The exhibition at 447 Space, presents a selection of 20 works made between 1970 and 2025, spanning over 55 years.

FRANCES BARTH, Guard, 2024, 30 x 40 in., Acrylic, pencil on canvas
“As we spend time with her canvases, no matter what associations they arouse, we are always captured and held, in the end, by those subtle surfaces, by that fragile line, by the suggestive but ultimately mysterious images, and by the irresistible color. There is a lot to look at in Barth’s paintings.”
- Karen Wilkin, excerpt from the Catalogue for the exhibition, Frances Barth: Five Decades, 2025

FRANCES BARTH, Mariner (two panels), 1977, Acrylic, enamel on canvas, overall dimension: 72 x 144 in.
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, Tower 2, 2023, Acrylic on canvas, 24x 36 inches.