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Jennifer Bartlett, an icon of the New York artwork world within the Seventies and 80s, died on 25 July at her residence in Amagansett on Lengthy Island. She was 81 years previous. Her demise was confirmed by the galleries Paula Cooper and Marianne Boesky, which each characterize her. Bartlett was greatest identified for her meticulous, large-scale works that spanned portray, printmaking and sculpture, combining the gridded serialism of Conceptual and Minimalist artwork with a shiny, painterly expressionism that moved between figuration and abstraction.
Bartlett, born Jennifer Losch in 1941, grew up in Lengthy Seashore, California. She obtained her BA from Mills School in Oakland, California in 1963 earlier than enrolling within the Yale Faculty of Artwork’s MFA programme, the place she got here into contact with such titans as Richard Serra, Jack Tworkov, James Rosenquist and Claes Oldenburg, amongst others. The exploratory spirit of the age reworked her method to art-making, main her from the Arshile Gorky-inspired drawings of her early years to a extra materially creative, formally formidable method. Bartlett would later sum up her time at Yale to her pal and fellow artist Elizabeth Murray in a 2005 interview for BOMB journal: “I’d walked into my life.” In 1964, she married Ed Bartlett and took his final title. In 1965, she obtained her MFA from Yale and commenced renting a studio in New York Metropolis, making artwork in her free time whereas commuting to New Haven to show on the College of Connecticut.
Throughout these first years out of faculty, Bartlett was possessed by an experimental vitality and curiosity in materiality. She would make journeys to the economic provide shops on Canal Road to purchase rubber plugs, rope and plastic tiles, subjecting them to numerous processes corresponding to burning, freezing and smashing. These experiments, alongside together with her curiosity within the process-based works of artists like Serra, Carl Andre and Mel Bochner, would ultimately lead Bartlett towards the creation of her most seminal and well-known work, the huge, multi-paneled Rhapsody, which debuted in 1976 at Paula Cooper Gallery to widespread acclaim and astonishment.
Rhapsody is a piece startling in its measurement and relative simplicity. It’s made up of 987 enamel-covered metal plates, measuring one sq. foot every, that are organized in a grid measuring practically eight toes excessive and stretching over greater than 150 toes of wall area. The plates fluctuate of their particular person compositions: some comprise pared-down depictions of timber and homes and ocean waves, some are stuffed with multi-colored hash marks or dots, different plates solely cohere right into a recognizable kind when seen from a distance, permitting a number of colored squares to grow to be one massive picture. The work is an expertise within the fertile floor between variability and uniformity, and heralded new prospects in its unabashed embrace of each conceptual seriality and large-scale figurative portray.
Bartlett would proceed on this gridded mode for a lot of her profession, whether or not within the architecturally-focused polyptychs of her Addresses sequence (1976-78) or the lined compositions of her splendidly moody plate work Within the Backyard (1979-83). In 1972, she divorced Ed Bartlett, and commenced instructing on the Faculty of Visible Arts, the place she would stay on college for 5 years.
The grid by no means left Bartlett, however because the years went on, her material started to shift extra towards the unstructured movement of nature. In her 1994-95 sequence of canvases dubbed 24 Hours, straight traces and picnic fabric patterning run up towards lush depictions of ferns and swimming goldfish. She additionally started to experiment with three-dimensional sculptural parts, as seen in installations like Sea Wall (1985), which featured constructed rowboats and homes in entrance of a portray depicting the identical topics, in addition to Fireplace/Three Cones (1989), which incorporates a comparable doubling between portray and sculpture. She continued to discover the interaction between linear buildings and deeply-felt figuration by means of her later profession, as seen within the foreboding compositional geometry and occasional jagged neon traces of her 2012 Hospital pastels.
Bartlett’s monumental ambitions and creative method to the mutability of pictures earned her widespread essential acclaim, and landed her works within the collections of establishments together with the Dallas Museum of Artwork, the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork, the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, the Museum of Fashionable Artwork and Tate Fashionable. She exhibited at Documenta and the Venice Biennale, and was the topic of retrospectives on the Museum of Fashionable Artwork and the Walker Artwork Heart, amongst others.
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