In the Country of Last Things
Document Lisbon
May 30–August 2, 2025

DOCUMENT Lisbon is delighted to present In the Country of Last Things, Alexandra Barth’s first exhibition in Portugal and inaugural solo show with the gallery. Featuring a new body of work, the exhibition traces the artist’s ongoing investigation into memory, material, and the quiet symbolism of everyday interiors.

Barth’s paintings explore how the spaces we inhabit retain traces of human experience through their furnishings, objects, and textures, even in the absence of people. With precisely layered applications of airbrushed paint, she renders hard surfaces with subtle softness, allowing their intention to sharpen as the gaze lingers. A red-striped curtain, a piano, porcelain bowls, the profile of a confession booth: these focused compositions resemble paused moments. They appear as quietly cinematic snapshots, yet sealed within their own logic. Each picture begins with a photograph taken by the artist, then translated into painting through a process that filters sensation through scale, distance, and time.

Barth, who grew up in Slovakia in the 1990s amid the visual austerity of Soviet-era housing, turns her attention to motifs that suggest both familiarity and dislocation. Now based in Sanguinetto, Italy, she gathers details from her current surroundings—marble moldings, mirrored wardrobes, fragments of domestic ornamentation—and allows them to merge with earlier impressions. Her paintings collapse time and place, fusing architectural memory with present experience. The result is at once restrained and atmospheric, clear-eyed and melancholic.

The exhibition borrows its title from Paul Auster’s 1987 novel, a dystopian narrative concerned with erasure, instability, and the objects that outlast us. Similarly, Barth’s compositions dwell in spaces where meaning is provisional, shaped by what remains after something—or someone—has left. Each work hovers between what is visible and what is withheld, shaped as much by what’s no longer there as by what remains. Her interiors suggest stories, but do not insist on them. They remain open, suspended, and vividly unresolved.

Alexandra Barth (b. 1989, Malacky, Slovakia; lives and works in Sanguinetto, Italy) received her degree from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, Slovakia in 2013. Recent solo exhibitions include LOOM Gallery, Milan, Italy (2024); Mrs., Maspeth, NY (2023); Photoport, Bratislava, Slovakia (2023); A SUD, Pescara, Italy (2022); Stone Projects, Prague, Czech Republic (2022); Chris Sharp, Los Angeles, CA (2021).