Uta Barth
Uta Barth (born 1958 in Berlin) is a contemporary photographer who lives and works in Los Angeles. Barth was a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004-05.[1]
Barth has used photography exclusively in her aesthetic projects, experimenting with depth of field, focus and framing to take photographs that are suggestive rather than descriptive, alluding to places rather than describing them explicitly.[citation needed] Her interiors and landscapes engage the viewer in an almost subliminal way, testing memory, intellect and habitual responses.Template:Http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/2aa/2aa239.htm
Her photographs take the opposite approach to the famous Düsseldorf school of photographers which include Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky. While they record their subjects in sharply objective archival detail, Barth’s images of interiors, buildings, suburban roads or natural environments are often out of focus, cropped and apparently empty of any foreground subject. What emerges from this reduction and abstraction of subject matter is a body of photographs evocative of great moments in the history of painting, or of a cinematic ambience.[citation needed]
Uta Barth's work is represented in numerous public and private collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Tate Gallery, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.[citation needed] Her work is exhibited regularly and has been shown in one-person and group exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the US and Europe including New York, London, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Stockholm, Düsseldorf, Bilbao, and San Francisco.[citation needed]
Uta Barth was named a 2007 USA Broad Foundation Fellow and awarded a $50,000 grant by United States Artists, a public charity that supports and promotes the work of American artists. Her primary galleries are 1301PE in Los Angeles, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York. She also shows on primary basis at Andrehen-Schiptjenko in Stockholm, Galeria Elvira Gonzalez in Madrid, and Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf in Germany.
Barth most recently had a solo exhibition at The Art Institute of Chicago, which will also be presented at 1301PE at the end of September 2011 in Los Angeles. The following is the wall text from The Art Institute of Chicago:
"Since the early 1990s, Los Angeles–based artist Uta Barth has examined photographic and visual perception—how the human eye sees differently from the camera lens and how the incidental and atmospheric can become subject matter in and of themselves. That is to say, she is perhaps less interested in where the camera is pointing than the act of looking through the lens in the first place.
The works that brought her to international attention, the series Ground and Field, presented photographic blurs caused by focusing the camera on an unoccupied foreground; these lushly colored images tested connections between the descriptive clarity of photography and the haze of memory. The 2002 series, white blind (bright red), which was rooted in the process of staring at a tree outside her window, explored optical after-images as literal and metaphorical modes of perception. And in 2007, Barth produced Sundial, a series of photographs in her home at dusk. Made at the moment when light begins to transition and fade, these images operate between positive and negative, visibility and invisibility, and shadow and light. Barth’s latest series, ... and to draw a bright white line with light, debuts with this Art Institute exhibition. As with much of her earlier work, the domestic setting continues to be fertile ground for nuanced explorations of changes in atmosphere, although for the first time the artist has intervened in the scene she previously had only observed. In this new series, Barth transforms a simple observation—the dance of a ribbon of light across curtains—into a complex photographic experience describing perception and the passage of time. The word “photograph” translates as drawing or writing with light; Barth’s new images, then, are quite literally photographs. This newest work is contextualized in the exhibition with select examples from white blind (bright red) and Sundial that have furthered her investigations into perception and light."
Sponsor: Generous support is provided by the Exhibitions Trust: Goldman Sachs, Kenneth and Anne Griffin, Thomas and Margot Pritzker, the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Foundation, Donna and Howard Stone, Mr. and Mrs. Paul Sullivan, and an anonymous donor.[2]
MONOGRAPHS
2012 Uta Barth. Blind Spot Publishing, New York
2010 Uta Barth: The Long Now. Greg R. Miller & Co., New York. Essays by Jonathan Crary, Russell Ferguson, and Holly Myers.
2006 Uta Barth 2006: Just Spanning Time. Essay by Cheryl Kaplan Exh. cat. Minneapolis: Franklin Art Works.
2004 Uta Barth: white blind (bright red). Santa Fe: SITE Santa Fe. Essay by Jan Tumlir.
2004 Uta Barth. London: Phaidon Press. Essays by Uta Barth, Pamela Lee, and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe; interview with Matthew Higgs; and selected writings by Joan Didion.
2000 Uta Barth: ...and of time. Artist’s book. Essay by Timothy Martin. Published in conjunction with a project commissioned by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, for the exhibition “Departures: 11 Artists.”
2000 At the Edge of the Decipherable: Recent Photographs by Uta Barth. 2nd ed. Essay by Elizabeth A. T. Smith. Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art and St. Ann’s Press.
2000 Uta Barth: In Between Places. Seattle: Henry Art Gallery and University of Washington. Essays by Sheryl Conkelton, Russell Ferguson, and Timothy Martin.
1999 Uta Barth: nowhere near. Artist’s book. Essay by Jan Tumlir. Published in conjunction with a three-part exhibition project by the same name at ACME., Los Angeles; Bonakdar Jancou Gallery, New York; and Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm.
1999 Uta Barth: nowhere near. Exh. brochure. Overland Park, Kansas: Johnson County Community College Art Gallery. Text by Jan Tumlir.
1995 At the Edge of the Decipherable: Recent Photographs by Uta Barth. Essay by Elizabeth A. T Smith. Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art.
SELECTED GRANTS AND FELLOWSHIPS
2010 Nominated for the 2011 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize
2008 Broad Art Foundation USA Artist Fellowship
2004–05 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship
1996 Nominated Tiffany Award
1994–95 National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship
1995 AMI Grant (Art Matters Inc., New York), Visual Artist Fellowship
1992–93 AMI Grant (Art Matters Inc., New York), Visual Artist Fellowship
1990–91 National Endowment for the Arts, Visual Artist Fellowship
1983–84 National Arts Association
PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Akzo Nobel Art Foundation, Arnhem, The Netherlands Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia Austin Museum of Art Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore Banco Espirito Santo Bitzer International, Sindelfingen, Germany The Capital Group, Los Angeles The California Endowment, Los Angeles Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami Citibank, London Citicorp Collection, New York La Colección Jumex Creative Artists Agency, Beverly Hills, California Curators Collection, Inc. Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas Dallas Cowboy Art Program Denver Art Museum, Denver Deutsche Bank Art, Berlin Goldman Sachs International, New York Groupe Lhoist Collection, Brussels The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles The Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York Huis Marseilles, Amsterdam The Israel Museum, Jerusalem J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Jarla Partilager, Stockholm Joseph Monsen Collection, Seattle Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles Magazin 3, Stockholm Konsthall, Stockholm Melitta Corporation, Minden, Germany The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Miami Art Museum, Miami Microsoft Art Collection MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts Moderna Museet, Stockholm Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, Florida Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago Museum of Fine Arts, Houston The Museum of Modern Art, New York Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas Norton Family Foundation, Santa Monica, California Oakland Museum of California Ohio University, Athens, Ohio Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix Princeton Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey Sammlung Hoffmann, Berlin San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, California San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Seattle Art Museum, Seattle Société Privée de Gérance, Geneva, Switzerland Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and Bilbao, Spain Tate Modern, London University of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada Verbund Österreichische Elektrizitätswirtschafts-AG, Vienna Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina, Greensboro Westdeutsche Landesbank Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Worchester Art Museum, Worchester, Massachusetts Zabludowicz Collection, London Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles
[3].
[edit] References
- ^ http://www.gf.org/fellows/826-uta-barth Guggenheim Foundation 2004 Fellows Page accessed 2010-01-15
- ^ http://www.artic.edu/aic/exhibitions/exhibition/utabarth
- ^ (undated) "Tanya Bonakdar Gallery artists page; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (New York).". http://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/artist.php. Retrieved 2011-01-30.
