Uta Barth

Uta Barth has in the past three decades come to occupy a truly singular position in contemporary photography. Having made visual perception itself the subject of her photographic work, her images may appear empty as they capture incidental and ephemeral moments with blurred backgrounds and cropped frames. By deconstructing the conventions of visual representation, she draws attention to the periphery and to the limits of human vision. Her images trace light, time and optical afterimages and aim to ask the viewer to become invested and conscious of their own perceptual awareness.

Barth was born in Berlin in 1958 and lives and works in Los Angeles. She received a B.A. from the University of California, Davis in 1982 and an M.F.A from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1985.

Barth was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2012 and her work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at venues such as SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, US, The Art Institute of Chicago and Henry Art Gallery, Seattle. Her work is well represented in a large number of public and private collections around the world. Uta Barth is a Professor Emeritus at the Department of Art at the University of California, Riverside and a graduate faculty member at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

A large survey-exhibition of Uta Barth’s œuvre was presented at the Getty Center in Los Angeles in 2022.