Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees. *
1301PE is pleased to present its first exhibition with internationally renowned artist Uta Barth. For this exhibition, Barth will present new photographs titled "...to walk without destination and to see only to see." These will be shown alongside recently rediscovered work made during her time in undergraduate school. The early photographs, made between 1979 and 1982, anticipate Barth's most recent body of work. They also reveal the artist's thirty-year commitment to the investigation of perception.
For the first time in ten years, Barth's new series of photographs take place outside. At the beginning of her career Barth made what she calls the "choice of no choice," photographing wherever she happened to be most of the time. After a decade of photographing light, time and ephemeral space in the house, Barth needed for the camera to go back outside. She now navigates the world beyond the house with the same spatial and temporal sensitivity demonstrated in her prior work. In this new
series, she combines photographs of her shadow with fleeting images of trees. The camera looks down and the camera looks up with a sense of reverie, but it never looks straight ahead searching out a subject. For Barth the subject of the work is perception and not what the camera is pointed at, as Barth states:
"To look up, to look down, but not to look ahead for a destination. To walk without destination and to see only to see."
Invisible spaces and the camera's gaze are interests Barth has been exploring since graduate school at UCLA. Barth's early black and white work contains the artist's first mature attempts at understanding visual perception through photography. This theme, which has remained constant in Barth's work, is one few other artists have broached with such a fine-tuned and meditative sensibility.
Barth was born in Berlin, Germany. She lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and has exhibited internationally at numerous institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Museum of Contemporary Art in Boston, and Museum of Modern Art in Istanbul. Her work is held in several important public collections including The Tate Modern in London, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Metropolitan Museum in New York, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
The exhibition occurs in conjunction with the release of Uta Barth's major monograph The Long Now published by Gregory R. Miller & Co.
* Line of Zen text and title of Robert Irwin's 1982 biography published by University of California Press.
