Bio

With the gentle touch of airbrush on canvas, Alexandra Barth renders hard objects softly, their intention appearing more clear as the gaze lingers. She captures the memory of details in a particular room using flat, soft color and a nuanced range of white. Light casts heavy shadows, angular objects converge and are personified in her scenes which evoke the quality of film stills. 
Barth’s works document objects, human intervention and absence. Each painting is initiated with a photograph captured by the artist. She transforms these images by creating a painting smaller in scale, only to enlarge and apply this very same imagery to a grander canvas.

The precision of her hand in replicating these compositions at both scales serves as a form of photographic duplication – in this way, Barth’s paintings function similar to editions, the petite works carrying as much weight as the more sizable ones. 
Barth, who grew up in Slovakia in the 1990s within the starkness of Soviet bloc architecture, hones in on objects that offer a sense of minimalism and uniformity. It is through this lens that she encounters other design traditions and class signifiers — Venetian moldings, fabrics, and wardrobes of her current residence in Sanguinetto, Italy– allow Barth’s paintings to fuse time and geography. They remain rooted in the present while looking back.