Throughout the past two decades, Uta Barth has made visual perception the subject of her work. Regarded for her “empty” images that border on painterly abstraction, the artist carefully renders blurred backgrounds, cropped frames and the natural qualities of light to capture incidental and fleeting moments, those which exist almost exclusively within our periphery. With a deliberate disregard for both the conventional photographic subject and point-and-shoot role of the camera, Barth’s work delicately deconstructs conventions of visual representation by calling our attention to the limits of the human eye.
A 2012 McArthur Fellow, Barth was born in Berlin in 1958 and currently resides in Los Angeles. She received a B.A. from the University of California, Davis in 1982 and an M.F.A from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1985.
Since then, Barth’s work has been the subject of major exhibitions worldwide. Notable solo presentations include to draw with light at SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, GA (2013), … and to draw a bright, white line with light at The Art Institute of Chicago (2011), Henry Art