ON VIEW MAY 25 - SEPTEMBER 3, 2024
Karen Barth, 1981. Photo by George Olsen
Born in 1951, Karen Barth arrived in New York City in 1975 after receiving her B.F.A. from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She earned her M.F.A. from Hunter College in 1983 and had a number of solo exhibitions during a prolific career that lasted until her death in 2015.
As a female artist, her dedication to painting and to abstraction at a time dominated by conceptual art and figuration (and by men) may have resulted in being overlooked in her lifetime. However, with this show, Pinkwater Gallery shines the spotlight on an artist with a prolific 35-year career, one whose work was last shown in Manhattan in 2016.
Using landscape photography as a catalyst, Karen devised a method of painting that imitated the effects of chemical emulsions. Working initially in a palette of darker hues that later blossomed into an array of colors as expansive as that of the natural world, her imagery evoked both the extreme closeup as well as the aerial view.
“For me, a painting is complete when it suggests a kind of mystery that exists in a realm between sensation and thought.”
Later moving on from the oil paints and canvas of her earlier works for polymer and wood panel, Karen became adept at creating works of great beauty on a small scale through well-honed processes of puddling, staining, dripping and pulling paint. In this way, she developed an innate understanding of how paint behaves, using a tireless method of trial and error while illuminating the ever-changing condition of a natural world that is always in flux. She ultimately moved to embracing the technology of digital printing, experimenting and refining the application of paint on small boards, then developing techniques of scanning and meticulously adjusting the images on a larger scale and calibrating color in a way that became integral to the final, beautiful result.
