
...and to draw a bright white line with light (Untitled 11.5), from the series "... and to draw a bright white line with light"
<p>Since the early 1990s Uta Barth has observed the atmospheric and the incidental to focus attention on perception and the act of looking itself. This series originated, as do many of Barth’s projects, in her home, where she noticed the mesmerizing play of light as she drew her curtains. In a significant departure from her usual practice, however, she intervened in the scene, manipulating the curtains to create lines and curves of light that she photographed. The root meaning of the word <em>photograph</em> is “drawing or writing with light”; Barth’s images thematize that etymology. Presented as a sequence of panels, the photographs also imply the motion of time, with its mix of continuity and rupture.</p>
Catalogue
- Year
- 2011
- Medium
- Inkjet prints (triptych)
- Dimensions
- Overall: 95.3 × 431.2 cm (37 1/2 × 169 3/4 in.); each panel, unframed: 95.3 × 141.7 cm (37 1/2 × 55 3/4 in.)
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Artist
- Uta Barth
Artist

Photography
Uta Barth is a contemporary German-American photographer whose work addresses themes such as perception, optical illusion and non-place. Her early work emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s, "inverting the notion of background and foreground" in photography and bringing awareness to a viewer's attention to visual information with in the photographic frame. Her work is as much about vision and perception as it is about the failure to see, the faith humans place in the mechanics of perception, and the precarious nature of perceptual habits. Barth's says this about her art practice: “The question for me always is how can I make you aware of your own looking, instead of losing your attention to thoughts about what it is that you are looking at." She has been honored with two National Endowments of the Arts fellowships, was a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004‑05, and was a 2012 MacArthur Fellow. Barth lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Full artist profile →More
More by Uta Barth
Sundial (2007.13)
2007 · Chromogenic prints
Sundial (2007.14)
2007 · Chromogenic prints
Untitled (00.1)
2000 · Photograph, colour, Chromogenic print, on paper
Field #20
1997 · Digital print with acrylic paint on canvas
[no title]
1995 · Lithograph on paper
[no title]
1995 · Lithograph on paper
Record
Verified by WattsOS- Artist
- Uta Barth
- Year
- 2011
- Medium
- Inkjet prints (triptych)
- Dimensions
- Overall: 95.3 × 431.2 cm (37 1/2 × 169 3/4 in.); each panel, unframed: 95.3 × 141.7 cm (37 1/2 × 55 3/4 in.)
- Watts ID
- WW-2011-143923
Source
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Source
- aic
- Reference
- View at source
- Status
- verified




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