UTA BARTH
b. 1958, United StatesFor the past twenty years, Uta Barth (b. 1958) has made visual perception the primary subject of her photographic work. Barth first gained critical acclaim in the 1990s for her Ground and Field series, in which she turned her attention to the information contained in a photograph’s often forgotten and peripheral background. Emptying images from what would often be considered a traditional subject matter or narrative, Barth makes the viewer aware of the phenomenological experience of perceiving. The question of how we perceive – versus what we see – differentiates Barth from the dominant trajectory of photography that is tied up with pointing at things in the world and in which subject and content are mostly one and the same thing. Making the “the choice of no choice”, Barth has confined her practice to the ambient, incidental and ephemeral.
A 2012 MacArthur Fellow, Uta Barth was born in Berlin and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Notable solo exhibitions have been presented at the Art Institute of Chicago; Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle; the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah; SITE, Santa Fe; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Her work is well represented in both private and public collections worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and Bilbao; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., Tate Modern, London; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; The Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
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Works at 1301PE
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