DEEPBLUES | PAINTINGS FROM 2019
Winter 2020
Frances Barth: DeepBlues
Recent Paintings from 2019 & Winter 2020
Winter 2020
Frances Barth
Deep Blues
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'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.
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)
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
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)
"... it's not an overstatement to say that they (Barth's paintings) suggest new possibilities for what abstract painting can encompass in the first part of the 21st century."
- Karen Wilkin, 2008
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
FRANCES BARTH
Reflections-the Moon (3 panel triptych)
2019 Acrylic on wood panels
24h x 92w x 1.50d in
60.96h x 233.68w x 3.81d cm
FB096
FRANCES BARTH
SEE-SAW (3 panel triptych), 2018-19
Acrylic on wood panels
24h x 95 3/4w x 1 1/2d in
60.96h x 243.21w x 3.81d cm
FB095
FRANCES BARTH
ENIGMA (3 panel triptych), 2019
Acrylic on panels (3 panels triptych)
24h x 86w x 1.50d in
60.96h x 218.44w x 3.81d cm
FB094
FRANCES BARTH
Stacking (3 panel triptych), 2019
Acrylic on wood panels
24h x 86w x 1.50d in
60.96h x 218.44w x 3.81d cm
FB097
FRANCES BARTH
Spreading Sand (2 panels), 2019
Acrylic on wood panel
24h x 60w x 1.50d in
60.96h x 152.40w x 3.81d cm
FB110
FRANCES BARTH
THEA, 2019
Acrylic on wood panel
24h x 30w x 1.50d in
(60.96h x 76.20w x 3.81d cm)
FB098
FRANCES BARTH
Drop Yellow, 2019
acrylic and gesso on wood panel
24h x 29.75w x 1.50d in
(60.96h x 75.57w x 3.81d cm)
FB102
FRANCES BARTH
Travel (3 panel Triptych), 2019
Acrylic on 3 wood panels
24h x 96w x 1.50d in
(60.96h x 243.84w x 3.81d cm)
FB111
FRANCES BARTH
ZigZag, 2020
Acrylic on wood panel
24h x 36w x 1.50d in
(60.96h x 91.44w x 3.81d cm)
FB113
FRANCES BARTH
Redline, 2019
Acrylic on wood panel
24h x 36w x 1.50d in (60.96h x 91.44w x 3.81d cm)
FB108
FRANCES BARTH
Splat, 2020
Acrylic on wood panel
24h x 36w x 1.50d in
(60.96h x 91.44w x 3.81d cm)
FB109
FRANCES BARTH
PurplePlane, 2019
Acrylic on wood panel
24h x 36w x 1.50d in
(60.96h x 91.44w x 3.81d cm)
FB107
FRANCES BARTH
Gentlerecline, 2019
Acrylic on wood panel
24h x 36w x 1.50d in
(60.96h x 91.44w x 3.81d cm)
FB106
