DOCUMENT CHICAGO | The Awnings
September 17–November 4, 2026
Alexandra Barth is a Slovakian artist based in a small town near Verona, in Northern Italy. Her painting practice is grounded in the observation of quietly evocative interiors and furnishings, rendered through precisely layered applications of airbrushed paint. For the past two years, she has turned this attention toward the retractable awning, a common feature of commercial and residential buildings across Italy and Southern Europe. Painting from unstaged photographs sourced on the web, Barth focuses on the awning in every form except its fully functional state—emphasizing instead its everyday, technical, and non-aesthetic aspects, and the tension between its familiar Italian character and its purely mechanical qualities.
The exhibition treats the awning less as a functional object than as a symbol, tracing the hidden lifecycle it typically undergoes unseen: manufacture, retail display, and eventual resale. Barth’s source images are drawn from online marketplaces such as Facebook Marketplace and Subito, where sellers of secondhand units post close-up photographs of pattern and condition alongside pictures of shuttered awnings removed from the storefronts and entryways they once shaded.
In The Showroom, a formation of small-scale models in various awning shapes curiously adorns an interior wall, echoing the display logic of the retail settings found throughout the exhibition. Red, orange, pink, blue, beige, and gray tones—drawn from the retail displays and online listings that inspire the work—dominate the paintings’ palette. By foregrounding the awning’s “behind-the-scenes” existence, Barth invites viewers to reconsider the quiet, overlooked architecture that structures public space.