ART-PRESENTATION: Jennifer Losch Bartlett

Jennifer Losch Bartlett is known for paintings and prints that combine the system-based aesthetic of Conceptual art with the painterly approach of Neo-expressionism. Many of her pieces are executed on small, square, enamel-coated steel plates that are combined in grid formations to create very large works. She often works in serial form or creates polyptychs, and she frequently devises rule systems that guide the variations within a given group of works.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Paula Cooper Gallery Archive

In a group of paintings from the early 2000s that interpret printed maps, Bartlett brings a new cultural and geographical specificity to her exploration of place. Bartlett exhibited her first map paintings in 2001, exploring the shape of cities in the United States. This new group points to the complicated relationships that exist between countries in Africa, and is perhaps a commentary on the arbitrary nature of the divisions that we use to organize our world. The intricately shaped canvasses reflect the complex nature of the borders between countries, some are organic – following coastlines and rivers, and some are geometric – as in the rigid lines that slice apart neighboring countries and peoples. Bartlett’s interest in maps reflects her ongoing exploration of the grid, which she incorporates and then moves away from to juxtapose the organic nature of topography. Richly colored and textured, there is a physical presence to these works. Reinventing the visual clues provided by maps, Jennifer Bartlett has again created her own unique visual vocabulary. By altering and abstracting cartographic conventions, the familiar motifs imbedded within are revealed. Maps hold obvious appeal to Bartlett, who has long been guided by the formal organizational structure of the grid and often worked according to a self-imposed methodological rubric. Interested in the map’s total claim to objectivity, Bartlett has manipulated cartographic representations of countries in Africa and the Middle East that she has not visited, thus avoiding personal associations and enhancing the arbitrary in the topographic signs. On large canvases shaped to mirror the borders of the nations they contain, Bartlett creates contours through the layering of organized marks before tracing a network of intersecting lines indicating roads, rivers, and internal borders across the complex surfaces. By shifting these geographical markers for aesthetic purposes, allowing natural and human-built routes to take unexpected turns, Bartlett questions the presumed objectivity of her source materials, in particular those that claim to depict disputed terrains. In a series of smaller canvases, selected geographic details are freed from the distinctive containers of their national outlines to become places of Bartlett’s own making. The topographical signs have been alternately transformed into painterly abstractions or familiar motifs. “Goba, Ethiopia”, for example, includes shapes and symbols that have populated Bartlett’s work since the 1970s: the house and the mountain, the triangle and the circle. Also in the early 2000s, Bartlett released the dots from their organizational structure and began building them into dense compositions. Across dazzlingly colorful canvases of irregular shapes and sizes, dots large and small vibrate with energy, occasionally expanding into rings of mesmerizing concentric circles. Using her painterly repertoire in unexpected ways, Bartlett literally and metaphorically explores new territory while expanding her visual vocabulary along the way.

Jennifer Bartlett was born in 1941 in Long Beach, Ca. She went to Mills College where she met and became friends with painter Elizabeth Murray. She received her BA there in 1963. She then went to Yale School of Art and Architecture for graduate school, receiving her BFA in 1964 and her MFA in 1965. This is where she found her voice as an artist. Some of her instructors were Jim Dine, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Alex Katz, and Al Held, who introduced her to a new way of painting and thinking about art. She then moved to New York City in 1967, where she had many artist friends who were experimenting with different techniques and approaches to art. The house is a subject that has always been of great interest to Bartlett. Her “House Paintings” were painted from 1976-1978 and represented her own house and the houses of her friends that she painted in an archetypal yet unique style, using the grid of enameled steel plates that she often uses. She has said that for her the grid is not as much an aesthetic element as it as a method of organization. Bartlett has also done several room-size installations based on a single theme, such as the series “In the Garden” (190) which consisted of two hundred drawings of a garden in Nice from all different perspectives, and later paintings (1980-1983) from photographs of the same garden. In 1991-92 Bartlett did twenty-four paintings representing each of the twenty-four hours of the day in her life, called “Air: 24 Hours”. This series, like others of Bartlett’s, marks the notion of time and incorporates the element of chance.  In 2004 Bartlett began to incorporate words into her paintings, including her recent “Hospital” series  based on photographs she took during an extended stay in the hospital, in which she painted the word hospital in white on each canvas. In recent years she has also done more abstract paintings, including shaped canvases.

Photo: Jennifer Losch Bartlett, Wedding, 2000-2002, oil on canvas, 79 x 120 in. / 200.6 x 274.3 cm, © Jennifer Losch Bartlett, Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery

Info: Paula Cooper Gallery, 524 West 26th Street, New York, Duration: 5/5-26/6/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00 (schedule a visit here), www.paulacoopergallery.com