Español | English
23/05/2012 - 20/07/2012
Galería Elvira
González is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in Spain of Uta Barth,
the LA-based German photographer. Forming part of the Off PhotoEspaña Festival, the show features fourteen works from
three different series: …and to draw a
bright white line with light.; Compositions
of Light on White; and her most recent suite of work, Deep Blue Day.
Uta Barth interview by George Stolz. May 2012
George Stolz: The work exhibited at the Elvira Gonzalez Gallery is closely related to the work you have published concurrently in a book [to draw with light, Blind Spot, 2012]. What are your thoughts on the relationship between exhibiting and publishing photography, and between walls and pages? I ask this with regard to your own work and way of working in general, and also with regard to this particular body of work and the way you have chosen to install it in Madrid.
Uta Barth: I make great efforts to get my work to exist as objects and to make these objects quite distinct from the conventions of presenting photographs. The surface is always matte, unlike the gloss or sheen of photographic papers. I need the matte surface in order to make it ambiguous where the eye is meant to land, so that it creates a type of depth; one can look into the image and not be fixated on the reflective surface we are so used to seeing. The images are framed differently for different bodies of work, some framed in the thinnest white frames available with no glass to obstruct the surface, others in floating shadow box frames to articulate the edge and reference to how a Mondrian painting may be framed, all are trimmed with no edge. All these strategies play with the phenomenological presence these works have when installed. Scale is also not arbitrary and varies from series to series and often even within a single body of work. Scale changes how we perceive things, when small it creates a sense of intimacy or it engulfs and surrounds the viewer when it is larger than the body. In this show the images containing my hand holding the fabric, holding the light, are printed to life size.
We live in a time where we can see entire exhibitions on the Internet and feel we know what we have seen but this, in no way, is true. The perception of images in a book or on the web has no relation to standing in front of an artwork and being able to observe all of the subtle qualities that play with our habits of seeing and create an experience of the work. Since at its core my work is always about visual perception I use various strategies to draw your attention to subtleties of the visual properties of every work.
In a book, however, I lose much of this but I gain other things of equal importance. I never make single images; I think in projects, in entire bodies of work and I am always saddened to see a show for the last time, as the interplay between different images disappears when it is broken up like a puzzle into many separate parts. Few collections can accommodate an entire body of work, and the pieces do have a life on their own, but the book format allows for each to be seen again in the context it was conceived in. The book is also a very intimate medium and allows the viewer to spend time with the work and come back to it over and over again. Things change with repeated viewing or when one lives with an artwork. All kind of subtle decisions are revealed over time. The sequencing of images in the book is very deliberate, as the juxtapositions are in the installation, but the book allows you more time to discover all that.
GS: Phenomenological concerns are of great importance to you and are deeply embedded in your work. Can you please discuss these concerns, particularly with regard to where your pursuit of endowing your works with a phenomenological ‘presence’ has currently taken you?
UB: I started out my career by making groupings of photographs that were all different ways to reference the act of “seeing,” combined with highly optical or op-art-like paintings. The abstract black and white painted patterns vibrate and created an illusion of seeing color much like a Bridget Riley painting will. The later work poses phenomenological questions in different ways, by making the point of focus unclear and referencing optical afterimages, etc. Phenomenology is a constant player in my work no more or less now than in the past. People often ask me if I make certain moves to confuse the viewer. I don’t think confusion is my intention, but I do make moves to cause you to have to reexamine your expectation of what a photograph can be by making images that do not conform to our existing vocabulary of the medium. I think that any medium is at its most interesting when it pushes the envelope of expectation, when it works “against the grain” of what we anticipate and forces us to truly experience instead of simply recognize what we encounter.
GS: You have said that the work entitled Composition #10, 2011 is perhaps your favorite work in this show, and that it is also the one you consider the ‘toughest’. Can you please discuss this further with regard to the way you look at your own finished work, and with regard to this body of work in particular?
UB: The series you are referring to is titled Compositions of Light on White (2011,) a project that traces the setting sunlight as it projects onto a white closet and a built in row of drawers in the bedroom of my home. For a few days each year the light streaming through the windows falls perfectly perpendicular to the minimal geometry created by the closet and drawers and thereby allows me to make Mondrian-like geometric abstractions by raising and lowering the window’s blinds to control the exact shape of the light. In all of the images in this series I have left a sliver of spatial information, a glimpse down a hallway on the left or the lines of perpendicular drawers to the right of the flat doors, in order to allow the images to “flip” back and forth from an initial assumption of two-dimensional space to the realization of a three-dimensional scene. They seem to flip from lines of pure geometric abstraction back to a photographic rendering of deep space.
However the one image you mention has been cropped to leave no evidence of the three-dimensional space whatsoever. It could be a photogram, a drawing or a painting, as all we have are rectangular shapes of light and grey. Two barely visible lines might clue in a sense of depth but it surely would go unnoticed if we did not have the context of the rest of the series. I like the simplicity; the image is stripped down to the most minimal elements and is composed of nothing but light on an already white surface. It requires your utmost attention to understand it as a photograph made in a room.
(...)
Click here to read the complete interview.
Uta Barth interview by George Stolz. May 2012
George Stolz: The work exhibited at the Elvira Gonzalez Gallery is closely related to the work you have published concurrently in a book [to draw with light, Blind Spot, 2012]. What are your thoughts on the relationship between exhibiting and publishing photography, and between walls and pages? I ask this with regard to your own work and way of working in general, and also with regard to this particular body of work and the way you have chosen to install it in Madrid.
Uta Barth: I make great efforts to get my work to exist as objects and to make these objects quite distinct from the conventions of presenting photographs. The surface is always matte, unlike the gloss or sheen of photographic papers. I need the matte surface in order to make it ambiguous where the eye is meant to land, so that it creates a type of depth; one can look into the image and not be fixated on the reflective surface we are so used to seeing. The images are framed differently for different bodies of work, some framed in the thinnest white frames available with no glass to obstruct the surface, others in floating shadow box frames to articulate the edge and reference to how a Mondrian painting may be framed, all are trimmed with no edge. All these strategies play with the phenomenological presence these works have when installed. Scale is also not arbitrary and varies from series to series and often even within a single body of work. Scale changes how we perceive things, when small it creates a sense of intimacy or it engulfs and surrounds the viewer when it is larger than the body. In this show the images containing my hand holding the fabric, holding the light, are printed to life size.
We live in a time where we can see entire exhibitions on the Internet and feel we know what we have seen but this, in no way, is true. The perception of images in a book or on the web has no relation to standing in front of an artwork and being able to observe all of the subtle qualities that play with our habits of seeing and create an experience of the work. Since at its core my work is always about visual perception I use various strategies to draw your attention to subtleties of the visual properties of every work.
In a book, however, I lose much of this but I gain other things of equal importance. I never make single images; I think in projects, in entire bodies of work and I am always saddened to see a show for the last time, as the interplay between different images disappears when it is broken up like a puzzle into many separate parts. Few collections can accommodate an entire body of work, and the pieces do have a life on their own, but the book format allows for each to be seen again in the context it was conceived in. The book is also a very intimate medium and allows the viewer to spend time with the work and come back to it over and over again. Things change with repeated viewing or when one lives with an artwork. All kind of subtle decisions are revealed over time. The sequencing of images in the book is very deliberate, as the juxtapositions are in the installation, but the book allows you more time to discover all that.
GS: Phenomenological concerns are of great importance to you and are deeply embedded in your work. Can you please discuss these concerns, particularly with regard to where your pursuit of endowing your works with a phenomenological ‘presence’ has currently taken you?
UB: I started out my career by making groupings of photographs that were all different ways to reference the act of “seeing,” combined with highly optical or op-art-like paintings. The abstract black and white painted patterns vibrate and created an illusion of seeing color much like a Bridget Riley painting will. The later work poses phenomenological questions in different ways, by making the point of focus unclear and referencing optical afterimages, etc. Phenomenology is a constant player in my work no more or less now than in the past. People often ask me if I make certain moves to confuse the viewer. I don’t think confusion is my intention, but I do make moves to cause you to have to reexamine your expectation of what a photograph can be by making images that do not conform to our existing vocabulary of the medium. I think that any medium is at its most interesting when it pushes the envelope of expectation, when it works “against the grain” of what we anticipate and forces us to truly experience instead of simply recognize what we encounter.
GS: You have said that the work entitled Composition #10, 2011 is perhaps your favorite work in this show, and that it is also the one you consider the ‘toughest’. Can you please discuss this further with regard to the way you look at your own finished work, and with regard to this body of work in particular?
UB: The series you are referring to is titled Compositions of Light on White (2011,) a project that traces the setting sunlight as it projects onto a white closet and a built in row of drawers in the bedroom of my home. For a few days each year the light streaming through the windows falls perfectly perpendicular to the minimal geometry created by the closet and drawers and thereby allows me to make Mondrian-like geometric abstractions by raising and lowering the window’s blinds to control the exact shape of the light. In all of the images in this series I have left a sliver of spatial information, a glimpse down a hallway on the left or the lines of perpendicular drawers to the right of the flat doors, in order to allow the images to “flip” back and forth from an initial assumption of two-dimensional space to the realization of a three-dimensional scene. They seem to flip from lines of pure geometric abstraction back to a photographic rendering of deep space.
However the one image you mention has been cropped to leave no evidence of the three-dimensional space whatsoever. It could be a photogram, a drawing or a painting, as all we have are rectangular shapes of light and grey. Two barely visible lines might clue in a sense of depth but it surely would go unnoticed if we did not have the context of the rest of the series. I like the simplicity; the image is stripped down to the most minimal elements and is composed of nothing but light on an already white surface. It requires your utmost attention to understand it as a photograph made in a room.
(...)
Click here to read the complete interview.
GALERÍA ELVIRA GONZÁLEZ 2013 · ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
