I’m happy to announce the results of the Armory Show’s TPC Art Finance Prize, the best “jury duty” I’ve ever served, published here in The Art Newspaper:

“Mrs. Gallery, based in Maspeth, sold nine works by Alexandra Barth, priced between $3,500 and $13,000 each. The gallery was awarded the TPC Art Finance Presents Prize, which awards a stand in the Presents section—reserved for galleries no more than a decade old—a sum equal to the cost of their booth.”

As reported on the Armory Show website, jurors for the prize include Kimberli Gant, Curator of Modern & Contemporary, Brooklyn Museum of Art; Jarl Mohn, Collector, President Emeritus, NPR; and David Shapiro, Principal, David Shapiro Fine Art. The jurors considered a variety of factors including thematic development, technical execution, and overall cohesion of the booth, and the decision was unanimous.

The following is Barth’s project description for the booth:

“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. For The Armory Show 2024, Barth will create a new series of works focusing on the domestic and intimate.

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.”