Uta Barth
Encyclopedia
Uta Barth is a contemporary photographer who lives and works in Los Angeles. Barth was a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship
in 2004-05.
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. Her interiors and landscapes engage the viewer in an almost subliminal way, testing memory, intellect and habitual responses.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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
.
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
in 2004-05.
Barth has used photography
Photography
Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...
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. Her interiors and landscapes engage the viewer in an almost subliminal way, testing memory, intellect and habitual responses.
Her photographs take the opposite approach to the famous Düsseldorf school
Düsseldorf School
The Düsseldorf school of painting refers to a group of painters who taught or studied at the Düsseldorf Academy in the 1830s and 1840s, when the Academy was directed by the painter Wilhelm von Schadow...
of photographers which include Thomas Struth
Thomas Struth
Thomas Struth is a German photographer whose wide-ranging work includes depictions of detailed cityscapes, Asian jungles and family portraits. He is one of Germany's most widely exhibited and collected fine art photographers...
and Andreas Gursky
Andreas Gursky
Andreas Gursky is a German visual artist known for his enormous architecture and landscape color photographs, often employing a high point of view...
. 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
Abstraction
Abstraction is a process by which higher concepts are derived from the usage and classification of literal concepts, first principles, or other methods....
of subject matter is a body of photographs evocative of great moments in the history of painting, or of a cinematic ambience.
Uta Barth's work is represented in numerous public and private collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
, the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...
, the Guggenheim Museum
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is a well-known museum located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States. It is the permanent home to a renowned collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions...
, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Tate Gallery
Tate Gallery
The Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art...
, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. 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.
Uta Barth was named a 2007 USA Broad Foundation Fellow and awarded a $50,000 grant by United States Artists
United States Artists
United States Artists is an independent nonprofit and nongovernmental philanthropic organization based in Los Angeles, California and dedicated to supporting the work of living American artists by the granting of cash awards, called USA Fellowships...
, a public charity that supports and promotes the work of American artists. Her primary galleries are 1301PE in Los Angeles, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is an art gallery located in Chelsea in New York City founded by Tanya Bonakdar. Since its inception in 1994, the gallery has maintained a consistent and rigorous program in the exhibition of new work by contemporary artists in all media, including painting, sculpture,...
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.
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
.