JENNIFER BARTLETT

Known for painted images that appear to move back and forth in a progressive way, Jennifer Bartlett conveys a sense of computer systems operating behind the visual movement of her work, which is both abstract and realistic. Her career as a Conceptual artist "came of age in the late 1960s" when at age 27 and reflecting the prevalent style of Minimalism, she decided to do all of her artwork on a 16-gauge steel panel, 1-foot square that looked "like a very thin flooring tile" (Katz, 106) and that had been pre-prepared with silk-screened grid lines, giving the appearance of graph paper. For the next several years, she worked on these panels by dabbing a "single point of paint into some of the tiny squares." The result was unpredictable, which led to her own style and confidence in her unique creativity. In 2006, the Addison Gallery in Andover, Massachusetts held an exhibition of the works representative of this phase of Bartlett's career. The exhibit was titled "Jennifer Bartlett: Early Plate Work."

She studied at Mills College in California and there met mixed-media sculptor Elizabeth Murray. She received further training at the Yale School of Art and Architecture at a time when Minimalism was all-prevalent. However, there she became friends with Chuck Close, and like them developed a style of her own. She had wearied of Minimalism and its limitations of single images.

One of her major pieces, "Rhapsody," completed in 1976 in New York, covered the walls of the Paula Cooper Gallery with 988 variations of mountains, trees, oceans and houses. They were paintings on enamel on twelve-inch steel plates, and each plate had a silk-screened grid with a total of 2304 spaces.

For the Federal Building in Atlanta, Georgia, she created a two-hundred foot mural that had both steel plates and canvas, and in 1981, she did a thirty-foot long mural of a garden, whose theme she painted in smaller works throughout the building.

Sources include:
Vincent Katz, "Bartlett Shows Her Colors", Art in America, January 2007, pp. 106-111
American Women Artists by Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein

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