Uta Barth: “Perception and the Act of Looking” →

Brian Butler April 9, 2026

Uta Barth | EXIT Imagen y Cultura #99, Published March 2026

by Guillermo Espinosa

Few fine art photographers have accommodated phenomenology into their work in a more direct and enlightening way than Uta Barth (Berlin, 1958). The German-American photographer’s evident desire to redefine the act of looking in perceptual terms triggers questions that relate directly to the culture of the image and the meaning that looking imparts on the act of representation. It is a position that can possibly be traced back to her reading of two works that are central to the development of knowledge and aesthetic theory in the 20th century: Phenomenology of Perception (1945, translated into English in 1961) by the French Marxist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (1958, revised and extended in 1974) by the German Gestalt psychologist Rudholf Arheim. The first of these works holds that is is the body—and not the conscience—that truly allows us to interpret reality and illuminate our subjective interpretation of the world through a biological mechanism shared by all human beings. The second breaks down the processes of perception and their relationship with the creation of all images aesthetics: from the differentiation between figure and background to mathematical composition strategies and the flaws and manipulations of perception required to represent a three-dimensional reality on a two-dimensional surface. In short, both works appeal to the eye and its perceptuial processes as the true source of an interpretation of reality or its replication as an image, which is then processed subjectively by the human brain and psyche. Barth’s work can largely be seen as a conscious affirmation of these hypotheses, which explain her importance to late 2-th-centiry contemporary photography.

Paul Winstanley: “IMAGES ARE HIGHLY FABRICATED INVENTIONS” →

Brian Butler April 7, 2026

Paul Winstanley | Rosanna Albertini’s The Kite

by Rosanna Albertini

Here I am, as the painter wrote, “the artists gets out of the way and leaves the viewer where once he stood.” I know Walkway is an image he reworked many times, each time a different painting in sync with a new state of his awareness of what he is doing. I use the present, as a sort of absolute time, separate from the fullness of things in which we loose the sense of our most intimate perception, and time steals our days. As I stand in front of the painting something from inside me is sucked in toward the silence of the white square at the end of the tunnel, so intense it is scary. The painting is, not the real physical place. Other humans have been there and marked their presence in graphic signs. The skin of the tunnel bears tattoos. Only in the painting they are indelible. But an un-human, vaguely pink-brown fog fights with the clarity of the white end. Forget reading. Only my soul can slide through the artist’s mental fog, and mine, maybe ours, in this damned 2026, where reason has lost her way. “life seeps in unintentionally, subliminally” (PW)

‘Surface, translucency, light and space are all as one; they are indivisible. … a pure idea of the physicality and illusion of the painting.” (PW)

On the wall, in the gallery, “ the subject of the painting has ceased to be the walkway or the trees but was instead the painting’s own mediation of these things.” (PW)

What I write here makes sense when we are in front of the painting, the 87 x 60 inches of a window whose semitransparent curtain filters the outside scenery and remakes it intensified on the floor. My brain, at first, was seeing nuances of gray as the dominant colors. My eyes were mimicking the curtain, tricky as they are. I stayed still for a while, waiting: and colors come to me.

As if the painting was waking from sleep. It was such a wonderful sensation that I liked to believe it was true for a second, a magical mutation. The one who was asleep was my brain, slowly making the colors out of the waves of light hitting the receptors at the door of my eyes. I am old, no surprise. You wrote it at page 94, dear artist, “Self-irony, or knowingness, is always present as part of nostalgia, even when we are tempted to think it is not.”

The viewer needs it as much as you. I continue to see the light blue and the pink in the sky that gives to the painting a vaguely luminous area taking off from the top of the trees, as if the end of foliage was a landscape line. The profile of earthly creatures. I want to be a bird in that sky.

SUPERFLEX: There Are Other Fish In The Sea →

Brian Butler April 7, 2026

SUPERFLEX
April 14, 2026 – August 2, 2026 | Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and Fondazione Hillary Merkus Recordati present There Are Other Fish In The Sea, a new site-specific installation for the Courtyard of Palazzo Strozzi by SUPERFLEX, the internationally recognised Danish collective known for works and long-term projects that rethink the role of art in relation to the social, economic, and environmental dynamics of our time. The installation is produced in collaboration with Kunsthal Spritten, Aalborg, Denmark that will host the work in a renewed version at its grand opening in 2027.

Curated by Arturo Galansino, Director General of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, the installation will establish a suggestive and unexpected dialogue with the Renaissance architecture of the courtyard. Anticipating a future in which rising sea levels will irreversibly alter human life, the work introduces a form of “interspecies architecture” that invites visitors to imagine new modes of coexistence between human and non-human beings. Marking sixty years since the devastating 1966 flood in Florence, the courtyard becomes the point of departure for prompting a shift in perspective on our relationship with the environment, questioning the traditional centrality assigned to humans.

Developed specifically for Palazzo Strozzi, the installation is part of Palazzo Strozzi Future Art, a programme by Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and Fondazione Hillary Merkus Recordati dedicated to fostering interventions by contemporary artists who generate new connections between past and future.