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Indepth Arts News:
"The Minimalist Years, 1960-1975: Jo Baer"
2002-09-12 until 2003-06-15
Dia Center for the Arts
New York, NY,
USA
"The Minimalist Years, 1960-1975," an exhibition of works by
American artist Jo Baer, brings together some twenty paintings
and a number of drawings and prints produced in the years she
lived in New York City. The exhibition is Baer's first solo museum
exhibition in the United States since 1975. The exhibition includes a number of Baer's early works, which
address the relations of pictorial edge and field and of color
and composition, plus more eccentric works from the
mid-seventies, which explore questions of flatness versus
volume, frontality versus multiple vantage points, and
objecthood versus illusion.
Baer has characterized her paintings of the 1960s and early
1970s as hard-edge and concerned greatly with color. However, as
critic Lucy Lippard noted about her work in 1966, "the mood is
more romantic than factual." In some works a square white
expanse in the central area of the painting is framed by a thin
band of color-for example, turquoise, lavender, blue,
mustard-reiterated with black. The strip of color serves to
mediate the dichotomy of black and white and animate the
relationship of field and frames. Often, Baer's use of paint is
not contained by the frontal boundaries of the canvas. In some
works, stripes, bars, and arcs of paint cling to the sides or
top of the canvas, breaking with the frontality conventional to
modular painting, to explore multiple vantage points and to
flirt with situation and context.
Jo Baer
Born in Seattle, Washington, in 1929, Baer attended the
University of Washington and later the New School for Social
Research, where she studied perceptual psychology and
philosophy. Baer's early works established her solid reputation
as an important force in Minimalist art. Following her first
solo show in 1966, she participated in Documenta IV in Kassel,
Germany (1968), was awarded an artist fellowship from the
National Endowment for the Arts (1969), and was the subject of a
retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York
(1975). In 1978 and again in 1986, Baer had retrospectives at
the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, in Eindhoven, The Netherlands,
followed in 1999 by a major retrospective at the Stedelijk
Museum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Public Programming
Critic and curator Mark Godfrey will lecture on Jo Baer's art
this season as part of Dia's Robert Lehman Lectures on
Contemporary Art. The lecture will take place at Dia's
exhibition facility at 548 West 22nd Street on Thursday,
February 20, 2003, at 6:30 pm. For more information the public
should call Dia at 212 989 5566.
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