"New Works"
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When Frances Barth first forged her identity as a painter, the most adventurous American abstraction was bound up with notions of refusal and sparseness. As if in response to the reading of modernism as each medium's jettisoning whatever was not intrinsic to it, Color Field painters and Minimalists alike rejected not only illusionism and narrative but also physical density and (often) complexity of scale and internal relationships in favor of generous, lucid, disembodied structures. Barth's own early abstractions, which established her as an artist to be reckoned with, were about the evocative power of large, thin expanses of uninflected color - restrained, amply proportioned, geometric compositions of surprising hues orchestrated for maximum expression.
