BARTH 2025.198

Trained as an oil painter, Jean Barth combines this with her knowledge of digital imagery to create portraits and still lifes. She creates images using 3D-modelling software and then, using oils, screenprints them onto boards and canvases. Brushing the pictures while the paint is still wet, Barth creates the blurred effect that lends her scenes a sense of ambiguity and mystery.

The figure in Clumped Spirit (Performance Capture) 2024 is dressed in a motion-capture suit, which uses sensors to record the physical movements of the wearer and translate them into digital data. Barth combines the contemporary digital world with iconic modernist design by placing the figure in a Grand Confort chair, originally designed in 1928 by Swiss French artist and architect Le Corbusier with his cousin and colleague Pierre Jeanneret, and Charlotte Perriand. Referencing new technology alongside timeless design, Barth captures the influence of the digital era in the age-old medium of oil.