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| Exhibition Announcement for the late and great Karen Barth. Her website is here; Barth Website I first met Barth in a reading group in the late 1990s. She was immediately engaging: smart, verbal, and passionate about painting. We visited each others' studios. Later, when I began teaching in Florida, she strongly supported my forays into pouring and landscape references. I still have those emails. She was a vivid presence, a true painter and painting advocate. In the last months of her life she retained enormous energy and joy, evidenced by the work produced in this exhibition. |
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| Karen's recent works were made as small templates then printed and manipulated on the scale she normally worked. These works represent a departure in her technique, using the striations from a pulled surface to organize the space much like the defining texture strokes in Chinese landscapes do. |
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| The landscape reference can be overt, but Barth was equally interested in photography and digital technology's ability to mediate nature. She saw nature through both lenses. |
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| Karen wrote, "For me, a painting is complete when it suggests a kind of mystery that exists in a realm between sensation and thought." According to the press release, her practice is "inspired by the possibility of making a painting that is abstract and self-contained, while simultaneously suggesting a relationship to nature--a painting that is unfixed, evoking changing conditions of form, light, color and atmosphere." |
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| Detail. |
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| These works are so painterly, ( I've known Barth's work since the 1990)s, that I could not tell they are digital prints. It made me laugh--she tricked us! |
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| The exhibition was curated by Kelly Worman. |
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| The paintings are described as archival digital prints that are simultaneously painting. |
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| Congratulations to Karen Barth and the successful culmination of her final work, resulting in these breakthrough paintings. |
