ART CITIES: Dublin-Jo Baer
In the 1960s and 70s, Jo Baer explored non-objectivity in her black and white hard-edge paintings as part of the New York Minimalist movement. She left New York for Europe in 1975, eventually settling in Amsterdam after years spent in Ireland and London. Through the course of her move to Europe, Baer’s work shifted away from pure abstraction, gradually adding figural elements, text, images and symbols.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: IMMA Archive
The exhibition “Coming Home Late: Jo Baer In the Land of the Giants”, brings together a series of recent paintings inspired by the artist’s stay in the archaeologically rich countryside of County Louth between 1975 and 1982. The series of six works completed between 2009 and 2013, presented alongside two additional paintings dating to 2020, was fuelled by Baer’s continued research into Irish Neolithic artefacts and myths. They reflect the artist’s long-life interest in history and science and trace the convergences and timelines of thought and memory between the ancient and now. Jo Baer arrived in Ireland in 1975 where she became chatelaine of the unheated 37-room Smarmore Castle in County Louth. Until her departure in 1982, she furthered her move away from the abstraction for which she was so well known and towards the complex transhistorical stories that needed telling through realistic painting. Yet whether dealing in line or figure, Baer’s work continued to identify the source of the borders we create so that we might undo them, and to value the peripheries from which we come. A Neolithic Hurlstone on the castle demesne ‘thrown there by giants’ according to locals, became the departure point for her painting series In the Land of the Giants completed several decades later (2009–13) that explores rich intercultural connections. Born in 1929, Baer was one of the key figures of the Minimalist painting movement in New York in the 1960s and early 1970s. During this period, she explored the formal aspects of the medium and developed a visual language of non-objectivity in her black and white hard-edge paintings, culminating in her acclaimed solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975. That same year, reflecting on Minimalism’s failure to respond to the dramatic events of the 1960s, Baer abandoned the style and left New York to become chatelain of Smarmore Castle in County Louth. Over the next seven years, her practice gradually shifted towards a ‘radical figuration’, also known as ‘image constellations’ that combine figural elements, text, images, and symbols.
Photo: Jo Baer, Dusk (Bands and End-Points), 2012, Oil on canvas, 86-5/8″ × 118-1/8″ (220 cm × 300 cm), © Jo Baer, Courtesy Irish Museum of Moder Art
Info: Curators: Christina Kennedy, Aoife Ruane & Janine Armin, IMMA (Irish Museum of Moder Art), Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin 8, Ireland, Duration: 24/8/2023-21/1/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 12:00-17:30, https://imma.ie/
