As part of her career-spanning 2022–23 survey, “Peripheral Vision” at the Getty, and in honor of the museum’s 20th anniversary, the German-American photographer Uta Barth presented an expansive commission entitled “…from dawn to dusk” (2022). Twice a month for a year, the artist visited the Getty to photograph the entrance to its auditorium, making an exposure every five minutes from sunrise to sunset. The resulting series of square-formatted photographs, extended as grids across multiple walls and enveloped the gallery. For the project’s February section, Barth also included a subtle time-lapse video that documented the transitions on the facade. This show at 1301PE highlighted three months—November, December and February—of the project. Even excerpted from their original context, they evidenced the precision of Barth’s observations, becoming an evocative meditation on the relationships between light, color and architecture.

The grid formation of “…from dawn to dusk” formally parallels the square blocks of Getty architect Richard Meier’s design for the compound’s facade. In this work, Barth continuously transforms the same square image by presenting it in different sizes and with different emphases such that the overall piece explores ideas of absence and presence, as indicated by the ever-changing fluctuations of light and shadow.  

Uta Barth, Untitled #12, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and 1301PE.

In the upstairs gallery was a display of new depictions of the front of the auditorium, installed across numerous walls with their top edges aligned. Here, Barth was coy and playful, unabashed in foregrounding her blatant image manipulations. For example, in Untitled #4 (all 2024) a bright white circle covers most of the image, allowing only the dark lines of the architecture to show through, making the work more about this strange, foreign shape than the setting. In the approximately 10 x 10 inch vertically hung diptych Untitled #10, an orange extension cord occupies the lower portion of the top image. In the bottom image, the extension cord remains, now surrounded by a darker orange that completely obscures the building. In Untitled #9, the site’s architecture is viewed through a blurred quasi-transparent screen that resembles a chain-link fence. It becomes a study of depth and spatial illusions. The two images that include Untitled #7 are presented side by side. One appears to be a solarized night view and is deep blue; the other is an abstracted blur of the building that reduces it to areas of color: white-gray in the middle, blue on the left and a light orange yellow at the top right. It is almost as if what appears on the right is what one sees when squinting at the image on the left.

In these pieces, the emphasis is not on the individual picture, but on the myriad ways it can be transformed and what those transformations imply about the difference between what the eye sees and how the camera records. Barth goes beyond the act of looking by manipulating the visual cues (the passage of the sun and its shadow) by which we map our days: She draws our attention to the subjective nature of our own passage through time and space, contingent on our perception of it.