Uta Barth in Second Nature at Modernism →

Uta Barth
September 4 - November 1, 2025 | Modernism, San Francisco

Uta Barth, Ground 10 (1992-93), chromogenic print on panel, Ed. 4 of 5, 29 1/2 x 27 1/2 inches

Nature has arguably been the favorite subject of artists since the beginning of time. While some artists dedicate their practice to portraying the natural world as it appears with accuracy, others use nature loosely as a muse or starting point to employ their artistic processes. In today’s world where we are inundated with content of nebulous artificiality, questioning is this real or fake has become second nature. While artists continue to use nature as a subject and inspiration, the question is this nature or is this a product of a human intervention feels more pertinent than ever when viewing art and imploring so feels instinctual. 

Modernism is pleased to present Second Nature, a group show of 50 artworks from 1900 to contemporary, which explores the indeterminate boundary between the organic and the constructed. The exhibition brings together works that appear to authentically depict nature with seemingly blatant manipulations of the natural world. As the organic is transformed and artificial compositions mimic nature, Second Nature invites viewers to reconsider the divide. What appears raw may be refined and what seems fabricated, unexpectedly true to nature.

Through material, process, and form, artists in Second Nature create confounding contradictions: natural but not, nature but also artificial. In portraying the natural world, rather inauthentically, a sort of “second nature,” i.e. not the original, now once or even twice removed, emerges. And asking the question is it nature or not is only second nature.

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Uta Barth in Split Diopter 2, curated by Jan Tumlir and Reza Monahan, at SCI-Arc Gallery, Los Angeles →

Uta Barth
June 6 - July 20, 2025 | Southern California Institute of Architecture Gallery, Los Angeles

Uta Barth, Field #9, 1995

Split Diopter 2 explores the relationship between fine art and cinema, as well as the impact of technical optics on creative practice. This exhibition disassembles the cinematic apparatus of the “waking dream” into a collection of parts: still frame, action sequence, mise-en-scene, soundtrack, film reel, promotional poster, etc.—each of which is assigned to an individual work of art. Navigating this array of objects in the space of the gallery, viewers are enjoined to imagine their own filmic narrative, while also reflecting on its material means of construction.

Split Diopter 2 features works by Uta Barth, Matthew Brannon, John Divola, Alex Israel, William E. Jones, and Hedi El Kholti. A soundtrack has been composed for the exhibition by Eyvind Kang. Also included is a dance video shot with a split diopter lens, choreographed by Brian Golden and performed by Jas Lin, Madison Ostrach, and Euseon Song. Finally, Split Diopter 2 presents a documentary in which artists Stan Douglas, Lynne Marsh, Patti Podesta, Jeffrey Stuker, and Liam Young discuss the influence of cinema on their respective practices.

*Split Diopter 2 is based on Split Diopter held at Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery and Co-Curated by Guggenheim Gallery Director, Marcus Herse.

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Uta Barth in Blur / Obscure / Distort: Photography and Perception at the Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach →

Uta Barth
April 5 - August 24, 2025 | Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach

Installation view of Blur / Obscure / Distort: Photography and Perception (April 5 – August 24, 2025) at the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida. Courtesy of the Norton Museum of Art. Photo: Ashley Kerr.

Blur / Obscure / Distort: Photography and Perception brings together photographs that are linked by the common objective of disrupting the viewer’s sense of time, space, place, or scale. Sometimes considered errors, photographic blur, distortion, and obfuscation have also been important creative and aesthetic strategies adopted by artists since the medium’s 19th-century inception. Highlighting photographs from the Norton’s Collection and a selection of special loans, this exhibition points to the constructed nature of perception and, in turn, photography’s vulnerability to manipulation even when it appears to show what is “real.”

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Uta Barth in Anonymous Was A Woman: The First 25 Years at the Grey Art Museum →

Uta Barth
April 4 - July 19, 2025 | Grey Art Museum, New York University

Installation view of Anonymous Was A Woman: The First 25 Years. Courtesy Grey Art Museum, New York University. Photo: Simon Cherry

This exhibition celebrates Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW), a grant program for mid-career women artists living and working in the United States. Featuring works by 41 of the 251 artists who received the award in its first quarter century, it provides a timely opportunity to look back at a crucial period of art production by women, and to reflect on the program’s enormous impact.

Since its inception, AWAW has helped reshape the landscape of arts funding, filling a vacuum left after the National Endowment for the Arts terminated its grants to individual artists in 1994. Every year between 1996 and 2020, AWAW awarded unrestricted gifts of $25,000 to ten women artists over the age of 40; in recent years, both the amount of the award and the number of awardees have increased. Initiated and still led by photographer and philanthropist Susan Unterberg, who herself remained anonymous until 2018, the groundbreaking program refers to a phrase in Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own,” which drew attention to challenges faced by women writers and artists in a patriarchal society. True to its name, AWAW solicits recommendations from over 200 unnamed nominators and selects awardees via anonymous panels. Over the years, the grant, which provides both financial support and professional recognition, has been truly transformational for a number of the recipients.

The artworks on view span an array of media, subject matter, and formal approaches. Equally wide-ranging are the generational, regional, ethnic, and racial backgrounds of the artists represented. Guest curators Nancy Princenthal and Vesela Sretenović sought works created as closely as possible to the year the artists received the award. Rather than choosing a thematic focus, the curators aimed to trace the development of contemporary art practice over the last twenty-five years, addressing issues of identity and community; the position of women artists in society; the shifting value of craft; the expanding possibilities for installation and time-based media; as well as the many uses of anonymity. The opportunities for future interpretations of AWAW’s importance remain, like art itself, infinite.

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Uta Barth at 1301PE →

Uta Barth | Artillery Magazine

Uta Barth, Untitled #7, 2024

By Jody Zellen

In these pieces, the emphasis is not on the individual picture, but on the myriad ways it can be transformed and what those transformations imply about the difference between what the eye sees and how the camera records. Barth goes beyond the act of looking by manipulating the visual cues (the passage of the sun and its shadow) by which we map our days: She draws our attention to the subjective nature of our own passage through time and space, contingent on our perception of it.

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The 10 most memorable museum exhibitions of 2023 →

Uta Barth | The Los Angeles Times

Installation View: Uta Barth - Peripheral Vision (2023) at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, California. Photo courtesy of the Getty Center.

By Christopher Knight

Yes, the show formally opened during the busy end-of-year holiday season in 2022, but there was no museum list last year (those pandemic issues) and, since the show continued deep into February, I’m taking the liberty of claiming it for this year. Barth’s radiant, perceptually illuminating photographs are just too good not to accentuate.

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Uta Barth →

Uta Barth | ArtForum

View of “Uta Barth,” 2023. Foreground, left wall: . . . and of time (AOT 2), 2000. Foreground, right wall: Untitled (and of time . . . 5), 2000.

By Kathryn Scanlan

“Peripheral Vision,” a forty-year retrospective of photographer Uta Barth’s work at the Getty Center, included selections from thirteen phases of the artist’s career, beginning with her early experimentations as a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, and concluding with “. . . from dawn to dusk,” 2022, a yearlong study of the Getty’s facade, commissioned by the museum, to commemorate its twentieth anniversary. The exhibition’s title underlines Barth’s enduring interest in the act of looking and refers us to the mechanics of human vision: We have a relatively small focal area—the point of fixation—surrounded by a large, blurred peripheral field. (Objects and surroundings in this nebulous zone tend to be familiar, nonthreatening—no need to examine them too closely.) Barth’s lifelong project seems to be all about the point of fixation: what we choose to focus on, what we don’t, and why. The intensity of gaze in some of her self-portraits from the 1980s operates like an interrogator’s spotlight: a violent force by which Barth, who has described herself as “incredibly photo-phobic,” is trapped, pinned, or blinded.

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Uta Barth @Tanya Bonakdar →

Uta Barth | Collector Daily

By Loring Knoblauch

In this particular moment in contemporary photography, it seems like we are once again in a battle to define what a photograph actually is. Of late, we are asking ourselves whether AI prompted images are photographs, or generative computational images are photographs, or NFTs are photographs, or certain kinds of video are photographs, and our answers are never quite as definitive or authoritative as we might like. The edges and boundaries of the medium are constantly in flux, which is a healthy thing, since it means photography is alive and actively being tested and extended by its artists; but this very process of reinvention also forces us to reevaluate which parts of the medium actually fundamentally define it as a distinct artistic practice.

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Uta Barth’s impressive …from dawn to dusk studies the grid of the Getty Center →

Uta Barth | The Architect’s Newspaper

Installation view, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, March 4 – April 22, 2023. Photo by Pierre Le Hors (Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles)

By Jennifer Tobias

Fresh from its Los Angeles debut, the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery has installed Uta Barth’s …from dawn to dusk (2022), commissioned by the Getty Center for its 20th anniversary and her retrospective there, in its ground-floor gallery. The seven works shown—compositions of images derived from a year of focusing on a single doorway at the museum—fully manifest Barth’s career interest in the mediation of human perception through photography. A capsule survey upstairs, organized by curator Elizabeth Smith, outlines Barth’s career with representative samples from her best-known series.

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Uta Barth →

Uta Barth | Brooklyn Rail

Uta Barth, ...from dawn to dusk (December), 2022. Mounted color photographs (pigment prints), dimensions overall: 32 7/8 x 100 3/4 inches, edition of 6, 2AP. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles.

By Jessica Holmes

Throughout her long career, photographer Uta Barth has probed the limits of human perception through deceptively simple imagery. Sheer curtains, glass pitchers, or bare tree branches are only ostensible subjects, conduits for an ongoing examination of what is her primary implement: light. Her current show at Tanya Bonakdar includes selections of the artist’s work from over the past quarter-century, evincing her distinction as an emissary of light.

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9 Must-See Photography Exhibitions in New York →

Uta Barth | Galerie Magazine

Untitled (nw 18)(1999) from "nowhere near" by Uta Barth Photo: Uta Barth

By Ming Smith

A master of capturing light, German-American photographer Uta Barth creates serene images that distill the fleeting aura of natural luminescence. This two-part exhibition features the New York debut of Barth’s most recent work, …from dawn to dusk, where she photographed the Getty Center every five minutes from sun-up to sundown for days throughout the year, resulting in 64,000 images that she crafted into a 360-degree installation and timelapse video. The second half of the exhibition surveys her key photographs exhibited with Tanya Bonakdar Gallery since the start of her tenure with the gallery back in 1995. Through April 22.

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Exhibition Review: Uta Barth →

Uta Barth | Musee Magazine

Uta BARTH. Sundial (07.8), 2008. Diptych, mounted color photographs. 30 x 76 inches (overall). 30 x 37 1/2 inches (each). Edition of 6; 2 APs. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles.

By Wenjie (Demi) Zhao

Uta Barth’s latest exhibition at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York City is a contemplative exploration of the nature of perception and experience. Barth’s work has always focused on the act of looking and how we construct meaning from visual stimuli. This exhibition consists of two parts: Uta Barth’s most recent work, ... from dawn to dusk on ground floor space, and Barth’s fundamental and exemplary works since 1995 in the upstairs gallery space. Through a series of large-scale paneled photographs, Barth invites the viewer to explore the ways in which our surroundings shape our understanding of the world around us.

One of the most striking works in the exhibition is “Sundial (07.8),” a diptych of two mounted color photographs. Each photograph depicts a corner of a room, where sunlight falls and glass glimmers in shadows, like the texture of a blend of cashmere and crystal, warm and bright.

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What Uta Barth’s Images Tell Us about the Limits of Sight →

Uta Barth | Aperture

Uta Barth, Ground #42, 1994, from the series Ground (1994–97)

By Kate Palmer Albers

In the fall of 1996, Uta Barth exhibited her then-new series Field and Ground at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York. Barth was living in Los Angeles, having joined the art faculty at the University of California, Riverside, in 1990 after earning her MFA at UCLA in 1985. The critic Mark Van de Walle reviewed the show in Artforum, invoking Barth’s relationship to the minimalism of Agnes Martin, the play between photography and painting in Gerhard Richter’s blurred paintings, and the sensitivity to light shared by Vermeer. Even in her foundational work, Barth was understood in relation to a long and significant history of artists. Van de Walle mused that Barth’s photographs, “by virtue of being pictures of nothing in particular, manage to be about a great deal indeed.”

At the time of that show, I had just moved to New York, as a recent college graduate, and happened to be working at a photography gallery down the hall from Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. I wasn’t reading Artforum regularly and had only just begun to learn about photography, but I must have stopped in to look at Barth’s show dozens of times. I still remember stretching my breaks during the workday as long as I thought I could get away with, to sneak in a few more minutes with Barth’s photographs. I would stare at them, and consider what they were telling me about photography, about seeing, about how to signal what matters.

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How Uta Barth's Art Illuminates →

Uta Barth | New York Times

Uta Barth, "…and of time (aot 4),” 2000.

By Arthur Lubow

The photography of Uta Barth unites the conceptual rigor that is characteristic of Germany, where she was born, with the fascination with light and space of California, where she has lived for the last 40 years.

Countering the instantaneous shutter click of the camera, Barth, who is 65, frequently works in series to explore how shifts in light alter our perception of a scene. It is not the scene that she takes as her subject, but the act of perception. Indeed, she intentionally turns her camera on unremarkable rooms and landscapes, as if to demonstrate that if you look closely and slowly, anything can become fascinating. And, at least in Barth’s images, beautiful.

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Review: Uta Barth's photos come into stirring focus at Getty →

Uta Barth | Los Angeles Times

Uta Barth, “#41,” 1994, chromogenic print. (Uta Barth / Getty Museum)

By Christopher Knight

In the 1960s, artist Robert Irwin famously forbade publication of photographs of his paintings — the spare abstractions of colored lines against colored fields, the tiny dots covering slightly bowed canvases to create a cloud of hazy gray atmosphere and the plastic or aluminum discs that stand out from the wall but visually appear as orbs that hover in space, like mysterious floating eyeballs.

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Uta Barth at the Getty →

Uta Barth | Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles

By Jessica Simmons-Reid

In her poem “There’s a certain Slant of light (258),” Emily Dickinson invokes the weightless “heft” of a beam of winter light—acutely slanted, knifelike, due to the sun’s low angle in the sky. This light, she writes, is “An imperial affliction/ Sent us of the Air -”—an ominous force capable of marking both the landscape and the psyche while paradoxically leaving nary a “scar.”1 Here, Dickinson juxtaposes the intangibility of light with its elemental ability to function as a conduit for somatic transformation. A touch of light, or its absence, can bestow life, growth, or death. It can also alchemize a fleeting image into a permanent one. In this vein, Dickinson’s poem is inherently photographic: Her words apprehend a transient choreography of light, leaving it indelibly burned to the page.

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Uta Barth: ‘Peripheral Vision’ Perception and the Act of Looking →

Uta Barth | ArtNow LA

Uta Barth, white blind (bright red) (02.7), 2002, mounted archival pigment photographs, Six panels, 21 1/4  x 161 1/4 inches.

By Jody Zellen

Uta Barth has been exploring the way light interacts with walls, surfaces and spaces throughout her career. The work is often minimal, showing empty areas or flattened planes and it relies on repetition and difference, sometimes subtle, other times drastic or dramatic. Peripheral Vision, an exhibition organized by the Getty Center that traces the highlights of her career includes examples of her graduate student works created at UCLA in the mid 1990s (black and white photographs made in the darkroom) as well as a recent commission that combines color digital photography with a subtle slow-moving video, in celebration of the Getty Center’s 20th anniversary. What is unusual about the way the show is installed is that many of her series are recreated and presented in full as they might have appeared in previous exhibitions. Rather than choose just a few representational photographs, viewers can experience the works as Barth conceived of them— as extended sequences rather than as individual images.

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Exhibition Review: Uta Barth →

Uta Barth | Musée Magazine

…and to draw a bright white line with light (11.2), 2011 printed 2021, Uta Barth. Pigment prints, 38 × 56 1/2 in. Getty Museum, 2021.51.1-.2. © Uta Barth

By Gabrielle Keung

Uta Barth’s exhibition titled “Peripheral Vision” at The Getty Centre presents a statement of her central artistic concerns. By zooming in on the illuminated surfaces of various colors and textures, she emphasizes the complementary relationship of light and shadows. By manipulating our sense of depth and playing with camera angles, she makes us reassert our vantage point as viewers and rethink the camera’s relationship to its subjects. By highlighting the vivid contrast between black and white in a picture where intricate and bare branches are set against a foil-like sky, she asserts the richness of monochrome prints. Barth’s works play with light and colors to appeal to our senses, expanding our imagination. 

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For artist Uta Barth, learning to photograph is a way of learning to see →

Uta Barth | Los Angeles Times

By Leah Ollman

Uta Barth is a photographer, and her chosen tool, the camera, is integral to the making and understanding of her work. But when asked about art that has had the greatest impact on her, she says, “I rarely think of photography. I think of sculpture and installation and painting. I don’t categorize media the way the world likes to.”

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The J. Paul Getty Museum : Uta Barth : Peripheral Vision →

Uta Barth | The Eye of Photography

Uta Barth (born in West Germany, 1958) makes photographs that investigate the act of looking. In her multipart works, she explores the ephemeral qualities of light as well as its ability to affect optical perception. Uta Barth: Peripheral Vision traces Barth’s celebrated career from her early experimentations while a student to later studies that probe the eye’s capacity and the camera’s role in translating visual information into a photograph. Organized chronologically, with sections dedicated to her most prominent series, the exhibition presents the first overview of the artist’s career in over twenty years.

“For nearly 40 years, Uta Barth has worked in Los Angeles, garnering international acclaim for her innovative perspective and signature approach,” says Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “Through teaching, extensive exhibitions, and publications, she has influenced an entire generation of new artists who appreciate the ways she has challenged traditional notions of photography as a carrier of objective information. This exhibition will provide a critical overview of the evolution of her work from its earliest days as a student to the present day.”

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