Bartlett, Jennifer

Jennifer Bartlett 

(California, 1941 - )

Jennifer Bartlett, one of the most important members of the New Image group, came to prominence during the 1970s. Her early work played 20th-century art movements thematatically, counterpointing theme and variation through large series of images. As Holland Cotter suggested in a May 1986 feature story in Art and America, "The 1976 watershed piece Rhapsody . . . summed up where Bartlett had been and where she was going, effectively laying out for inspection her accumulated formal data and possible stylistic strategies. The large work, 7.5' x 153.75' and composed of nearly a thousand gridded steel plates, began stylistically with her familiar Conceptual 'look,' then moved through episodes suggesting decorative and pattern art to something like Photo-Realism before concluding in a kind of Impressionistic dissolve. In short, Bartlett not only scoured early 20th-century art for sources but added nearly every '60s and '70s movement short of performance art, to the Minimalism, Conceptualism, and process art with which she was already working, and from all this extracted a hybrid species of painterly abstraction to pursue" (126). In short, in its self-consciousness about where it was coming from and its elaboration of all the places to which it might be going, Bartlett displayed a distinctly Post-Modern sensibility combined with dazzling technical facility.

1999   Jennifer Bartlett: New Work, Lawrence Rubin-Greenberg Van Doren Fine Art New York, NY
1998   Jennifer Bartlett: New Paintings, Locks Gallery Philadelphia, PA
1997   Jennifer Bartlett: New Works, Gagosian Gallery Los Angeles, CA
1996   Jennifer Bartlett, Important Works: 1974-1995, Locks Gallery Philadelphia, PA
1995   Jennifer Bartlett: Paintings and Works on Paper, Paula Cooper New York, NY
1994   Jennifer Bartlett: Air: 24 Hours, Locks Gallery Philadelphia, PA
1994   From Minimal To Conceptual Art: Works From The Dorothy & Herbert Vogel Collection, National Gallery of Art Washington, DC
1993   Jennifer Bartlett, Santa Fe Institute of Fine Arts Santa Fe, NM
1991   Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art New York, NY
1989   Making Their Mark, Cincinnati Art Museum Cincinnati, OH
1989   Making Their Mark, New Orleans Museum of Art New Orleans, LA
1989   Making Their Mark, Denver Art Museum Denver, CO
1989   Making Their Mark, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Philadelphia, PA

MUSEUMS AND COLLECTIONS:

Cleveland Museum of Art Ohio, U.S.
Currier Gallery of Art New Hampshire, U.S.
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco San Francisco, U.S.
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth Texas, U.S.
Smithsonian American Art Museum Washington D.C, U.S.
Tate Gallery London, U.K.

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