Frances Barth

Frances Barth, Untitled Ramble, acrylic on panels (triptych), 24" x 96", 2018. Frances Barth (born 1946) is an American visual artist best known for paintings situated between abstraction, landscape and mapping, and in her later career, video and narrative works. She emerged during a period in which contemporary painters sought a way forward beyond 1960s minimalism and conceptualism, producing work that combined modernist formalism, geometric abstraction, referential elements and metaphor. Critic Karen Wilkin wrote, "Barth's paintings play a variety of spatial languages against each other, from aerial views that suggest mapping, to suggestions of perspectival space, to relentless flatness ... [she] questions the very pictorial conventions she deploys, creating ambiguous imagery and equally ambiguous space that seems to shift as we look."

Barth has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and Anonymous Was a Woman Award, among others. She has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Dallas Museum of Art, and in the Whitney and Venice Biennials. Her work belongs to the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, among others. She is director emerita of the Mount Royal School of Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). In the 1960s, she attended Hunter College, earning a BFA and MA in painting and art history. Her early interests extended to sculpture (including studies with Tony Smith), movement and music; after taking a modern dance workshop at Hunter, she performed in works by Yvonne Rainer and Joan Jonas between 1968 and 1976. Barth also appeared in "American Painting: The Eighties" (1979, curated by Barbara Rose), and focused group shows at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and Corcoran Gallery of Art. In subsequent years, she exhibited at Tomoko Liguori, Sundaram Tagore and Marcia Wood (Atlanta), among others.

Frances Barth, Susan Caldwell Gallery exhibition, 1976; Mokroe (left), acrylic on canvas, 72" x 140", diptych; Artoosh (right), acrylic on canvas, 72" x 202", triptych.

Painting Since the early 1970s, Barth has explored the possibilities of meaning and metaphor within abstract paintings employing complex pictorial spaces and multiple points of view. The scumbled, scratchy forms functioned as both objects and atmosphere and suggested gently moving planes shifting places (e.g., Vermillion, 1973).

Frances Barth, After Midnight, acrylic on canvas, 96" x 48", 1997. Beginning in the 1980s, Barth began to add referential forms and markers to her geometric shapes, incorporating new spatial and graphic languages—aerial mapping symbols, schematic diagrams, perspectival rendering, modeling, pure flatness—that provoked multiple of readings of the work. In 1989, New York Times critic Roberta Smith wrote that Barth's "works have lately opened up into strangely angular landscapes, as abstract as they are imagistic and as gestural as they are structured."

In the 1990s, Barth incorporated classical Japanese influences into her paintings, while continuing to counterpoint Western illusionism against modernist flatness. David Brody described the collage-like interplay in Barth's 2017 exhibition (e.g., in Yellow Yellow, 2016 or Olive, 2017) as a place "precisely balanced between lucidity and mystery" in which "an absorbing world of imagination might also be a quirky transcription of observable facts." two documentaries (Regina, 2013, about painter Regina Bogat; and The Audition, 2018), and two narrative short films (No No Boy, 2015; and Dreaming Tango, 2020). In 2017, she published the graphic novel Ginger Smith and Billy Gee, which featured settings derived from her paintings. Barth was a guest panelist in a 1975 episode of Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. featuring Tom Wolfe, discussing his then-recent book The Painted Word.

Awards and collections Barth has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1977), and American Academy of Arts and Letters (1999, 2004), and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1974), Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation (1993), Anonymous Was a Woman (2006) among others. In 2011, she was elected to the National Academy of Design.

Her work belongs to the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, Cincinnati Art Museum, Dallas Museum of Fine Art, Davis Museum, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Newark Museum, and Tucson Museum of Art, among others.