Frances Barth

[8][17] Her early interests extended to sculpture (including studies with Tony Smith), movement and music; after taking a modern dance workshop at Hunter, she performed in works by Yvonne Rainer and Joan Jonas between 1968 and 1976.

[7][6][1] Her work frequently combines flatness and volume, delicately indeterminate color, and a sense of unstable space and scale, often in long horizontal formats that require viewers to "read" (and re-read) them slowly, from left to right.

[4][17][7] In her first major solo show (Susan Caldwell, 1974), Barth exhibited 10' to 16'-long horizontal paintings focused on color, movement and gravity, which evolved from common geometric shapes such as triangles, trapezoids and circles.

[17][19][4] By 1978, she was producing increasingly complex, mural-like arrays that Artforum described as "long, narrow, friezelike compositions of alternating circular and triangular forms, advancing, receding, stretching out beyond vision" (e.g., Mariner, 1977).

[4][29] Beginning in the 1980s, Barth began to add referential forms and markers to her geometric shapes, incorporating new spatial and graphic languages—aerial mapping symbols, schematic diagrams, perspectival rendering, modeling, pure flatness—that provoked multiple of readings of the work.

[19][30][6] Art in America termed her 1983 exhibition a deliberate "stylistic leap" toward "geometric landscape" with a "deeper, decidedly illusionist space" inhabited by volumetric forms and softer colors (e.g., Seventh New Year, 1983).

"[6] Reviewers of Barth's shows between 2006 and 2011 often focused on what Joan Waltemath called a "dialectical approach"[1] mixing divergent syntactic codes, perspectives and unstable scales to produce works simultaneously evoking mysterious terrains, geologic schematics, and "near-minimal abstraction.