Pinkwater Gallery is delighted to announce the grand opening of our new home at 237 Fair Street as part of Kingston Social, Uptown Kingston’s new café | mercantile | gallery.
Our first show in the new space will be a retrospective of works by the late abstract painter Karen Barth, whose work evokes ethereality and fluidity, inspired at once by nature and landscapes but made transcendent by the confluence of paint and technology.
THE
KAREN BARTH
ARCHIVE
ON VIEW MAY 25 - SEPTEMBER 3, 2024
POND (2) by Karen Barth (2014)
Karen Barth began her journey as a fine artist in 1975, living and painting out of a one-bedroom apartment in SoHo. Moving later to a loft on Chambers Street in TriBeCa, Karen met her husband George Olsen and became a mother to their son, Clay, all the while continuing to paint and develop as an artist. In 1995, she established a studio on 29th Street, where she tested new ideas and landed on her signature style, lyrical abstract images inspired by nature, “products of Karen’s lifelong preoccupation with and struggle to portray beauty” in her husband’s words.
Sadly, the world lost Karen Barth in 2015 after a long illness. This show serves to honor her memory and bring her emphatically beautiful and life-affirming work to a new audience.
SPRING by Karen Barth (2014)
“For me, a painting is complete when it suggests a kind of mystery that exists in a realm between sensation and thought.”
UNTITLED by Karen Barth (1988)
As we will see in this exhibition, works created in 2014 using archival pigment on paper are directly descended from the oil paintings created in the 1980s, in both their exploration of color relationships as well as the fluidity and flow of her imagery. Like many abstract artists before her, Karen Barth decided to forego the strict painting of line and shape, instead directing the paint to move on its own in an effort to explore what was possible, corralling it to speak visually in a voice all her own.
In an artistic career spanning over 35 years, Karen explored various types of experimentation with paint, with printmaking, and with digital printing, all while maintaining a through-line of remarkable continuity in the work.
“My method alternates between chaos and control, painterly and mechanical, to create a painting that is the result of a process, but which also evokes elements of landscape.”
Karen Barth’s artistic practice was one of process, wherein she would often begin by creating a small version of the work and then expand it on a grand scale as a large digital print, assiduously color-correcting each proof until landing at the precise size and colors she envisioned originally at a smaller scale. In this way, each resulting artwork is suspended between “an image that comprises the artificial and the natural, the abstract and the real.”