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Frances Barth
For Byron's Flat Bed Truck Ride
1973

Name: For Byron's Flat Bed Truck Ride
Brand: Frances Barth

$125,000List Price

About the Item

FRANCES BARTH Paintings from the 1970's Jack Whitten in his book "Notes from the Woodshed" (Hauser & Wirth publishers 2018) refers to Frances Bath 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 terricfic at Susan Caldwell's. Frances is a good painter". Frances Barth (who is now in her seventies) is one of the best American female Abstract Painters to date. Jack Whitten admired her work. She was represented in the 70's by Susan Caldwell who placed her work in prestigious collection including that of Mr & Mrs Robert K. Hoffman, generous patrons of the Dallas Museum of Art. Her wok is also in the collection the Metropolitan Museum and many others. Today, Frances continue to works on her abstract paintings while also pursuing inventive film creations and installations. Following the article that came out in The New York Times on September 24th, 2018 by Mary Gabriel, Want to Get Rich Buying Art? Invest in Women. More than ever, female artists are breaking sales records and being recognized for their role in important art movements (see NYTimes article below), Silas von Morisse is pleased to present in this Viewing Room, a selection of paintings by Frances Barth who is in the canon of historically significant women abstract painters working in New York since the 1970's. The New York Times September 24th 2018 : "Although Frances Barth’s painting practice may appear minimal at first glance, her formal vocabulary delivers a simple yet complex scheme; incongruent geometric shapes stand in contrast to one another on the vast radiant yellow landscape of Bowery Two (see above picture). The motionless triangular and quadrilateral shapes in dialogue with each other create a peculiar energy. Moreover, the asymmetrical configuration of the shapes suggests ambiguous relationships in the space they occupy. Barth’s composition presents an intricate visual field that allows figures of minimal agency to stand out through geometric configuration." Frances Barth is a noted American artist and teacher. She makes abstract paintings and videos. Frances was born in the Bronx, in New York City, and studied painting at Hunter College. She has exhibited her paintings widely in both solo and group exhibitions since the late 1960’s, and her work is represented in numerous public, corporate and private collections, including The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum, in NYC, The Dallas Museum of Art, TX, The Albright Knox Museum, Buffalo. Frances showed six of her paintings in the 2015 Venice Biennale at the Palazzo Grimani in "Frontiers Reimagined". Her awards include The National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1974 and 1982, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1977, the Joan Mitchell Foundation grant in 1995, two American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase awards in ’99 and ’04, the "Anonymous Was a Woman grant" in 2006, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2017. She is the Director Emeritus of the Mt.Royal School of Art, Maryland Institute. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1977. The title “For Byron’s Flat Bed Truck Ride” comes from an incident in a William Faulkner novel-“Light in August.” The timing of the scene in the artist imagination resembled the timing of this large painting-i.e. the timing of the ride of the flat bed truck. The painting was exhibited in a solo show for the artist at The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC Nov.8 to Dec.9, 1973 (Three NY Artists), and was featired in a solo show at Susan Caldwell Gallery in NY in 1974. THIS WORK IS PART OF THE ARTIST PRIVATE COLLECTION SIMILAR WOKS ARE IN THE PERMANENT COLLECTION OF THE DALAS MUSEUM OF ART, MOMA, MET etc. Frances Barth creates radically abstract paintings that defy categorization and suggest narrative, holding mysteries that never fully resolve. “It’s not an overstatement to say that they suggest new possibilities for what abstract painting can encompass in the first part of the 21st century,” critic Karen Wilkin has written of Barth’s works. At once familiar and uncanny, Barth’s compositions fuse elements of diagrams, maps, models, and charts, their swaths of flat color interrupted by lively lines. “The weight of and association attached to every line is considered in exacting detail,” Barth says. “The idea for the painting is based on the premise that something that was there is no longer there.” For the past decade or so, the artist’s paintings have offered the gradual unfolding of an ambiguous, almost geological narrative; though always abstract, her delicate manipulation of color evokes distinct senses of light and place.

Creator:
Frances Barth (1946, American)
Creation Year:
1973
Dimensions:
Height: 86 in (218.44 cm)Width: 195 in (495.3 cm)Depth: 2 in (5.08 cm)
More Editions & Sizes:
uniquePrice: $125,000
Medium:
Acrylic,Canvas
Movement & Style:
Abstract Geometric
Period:
1970-1979
Condition:
Gallery Location:
New York, NY
Reference Number:
Seller: FB0461stDibs: LU104413485471

Shop All Frances Barth

Frances Barth

Frances Barth is a noted American artist and teacher born in 1946 in the Bronx. She studied painting at Hunter College and makes abstract paintings and videos and has been the director of the multidisciplinary Graduate school at Maryland Institute College of Art, the Mount Royal School of Art, since 2004. Barth's accomplished paintings are wholly individualistic and other than to say they are radical abstractions, 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 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, a chemical color that doesn't exist in nature to open up like the sky but not be sky”. She has exhibited her paintings widely in both solo and group exhibitions since the late 1960s, and her work is represented in numerous public, corporate and private collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum, The Dallas Museum of Art and The Albright Knox Museum.

Frances BarthFor Byron's Flat Bed Truck Ride1973

About the Item

Frances Barth

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Frances Barth
For Byron's Flat Bed Truck Ride
1973