FRANCES BARTH
EXPANSES: RECENT PAINTINGS
June 2026
FRANCES BARTH, August Diptych, 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 30 × 80 in.
Barth is an American visual artist known for her use of color in paintings situated between abstraction, landscape, and mapping. Since the early 1970s, Barth has explored the possibilities of meaning and metaphor within abstract painting, employing complex pictorial spaces, multiple points of view, and abstract and tonal color.
FRANCES BARTH, Curve and Surround, 2025, Acrylic on panel panel, 14 × 18 in.
“The color is “non-determinable,” made from layers of colors that are perceived as optically mixed. I push the paintings into a realm that exists between landscape, mapping, animation, and abstraction, along with the idea of slow time in the reading of the painting, which for me makes it more experiential. Incorporating methods of drawing, modeling, diagramming, mapping symbols and charting into the work, along with moments of humor, my desire has been to not make the paintings be overwhelmed by the conceptions. I want them to have a seeming ease in how everything interacts, and to create a phenomenon of naturalistic light. The color in the paintings involves ideas of local, atmospheric, and abstract color..”
- Frances Barth, June 2026
FFRANCES BARTH, Flowing, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 16 × 20 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)
FRANCES BARTH, Red ochre, 2021, Acrylic on panelpanel, 14 × 18 in.
FFRANCES BARTH, Flowing, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 16 × 20 in.
FFRANCES BARTH, Flowing, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 16 × 20 in.
FFRANCES BARTH, Flowing, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 16 × 20 in.
FFRANCES BARTH, Flowing, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 16 × 20 in.
FFRANCES BARTH, August Diptych, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 16 × 20 in.
"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, Light Shadow, 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 40 inches.
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 received her advanced degrees in painting and art history from Hunter College, CUNY, and has been working and showing her painting in New York and internationally since the 1960s’. While an art student, Frances also studied modern dance. She performed with Yvonne Rainer at Lincoln Center and the Billy Rose Theater in 1968-9, and with Joan Jonas in dance and video in 1970.
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 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, 2017; Elected into the National Academy, 2011; Anonymous Was a Woman Grant, 2006; American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award, 2004; American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award, 1999; Joan Mitchell Award, 1995; Adolphe and Esther Gottlieb Individual Support Grant, 1993; National Endowment for the Arts Grant, 1982; John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, 1977; National Endowment for the Arts Grant, 1974; Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant, 1973.
She is the Director Emeritus of the Mt.Royal School of Art, Maryland Institute. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1977.
CHRIS PFISTER
COSMOS 1
Oils and Pigments created by the artist on linen
size in.
CHRIS PFISTER
ROLLING HILLS
Oils and Pigments created by the artist on linen
40 x 56 in.
CHRIS PFISTER
NOWHERE ROADS
Oils and Pigments created by the artist on linen
40 x 60 in.
CHRIS PFISTER
LINES
Oils and Pigments created by the artist on linen
40 x 60 in.
CHRIS PFISTER
COSMIC LANDSCAPES
Various Sizes: 12 x 16 in. to 16 x 24 in.
Oils and pigments on linen
Inquire with Gallery