447 Space is pleased to present Frances Barth: A Painting Conversation 55 Years. Barth is an American visual artist best known for paintings situated between abstraction, landscape, and mapping and in her later career, additionally video and narrative works. Since the early 1970s, Barth has explored the possibilities of meaning and metaphor within abstract paintings employing complex pictorial spaces and multiple points of view. The twenty-one paintings selected for this exhibition create a “conversation” from 1970 to 2025.

As we spend time with these paintings, that space shifts. The sense of stage set expands and pulses. Are we hovering miles above a distant, invented world or are we being presented, at actual size, with a selection of unnamable but intensely evocative table-top configurations? Or are we facing a complex diagram of something wholly unknown and ultimately unidentifiable? Or all of it at once? Barth says that she tells herself stories as she paints, as if narrating a journey through an invented universe. We mentally move through her unstable, slightly disorienting “places,” the way we travel through classical Chinese landscapes, following paths through forests, balancing on vertiginous ridges, and crossing fearsome chasms.

 - Excerpt from the catalogue essay Frances Barth: Five Decades by Karen Wilkin

This exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with a memoire by Frances Barth and an essay by Karen Wilkin, available for purchase here.

Frances Barth was born in the Bronx, NY and received her advanced degrees in painting and art history from Hunter College, CUNY, and has been working and showing her painting in New York and internationally since the 1960s’. While an art student, Frances also studied modern dance. She performed with Yvonne Rainer at Lincoln Center and the Billy Rose Theater in 1968-9, and with Joan Jonas in dance and video in 1970.

Her awards include: The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, 2017; Elected into the National Academy, 2011; Anonymous Was a Woman Grant, 2006; American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award, 2004;  American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award, 1999; Joan Mitchell Award, 1995; Adolphe and Esther Gottlieb Individual Support Grant, 1993; National Endowment for the Arts Grant, 1982; John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, 1977; National Endowment for the Arts Grant, 1974; Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) Grant, 1973.