Jo Baer in 2020 (© Yaël Temminck)
Baer, who initially rose to prominence in the course of the burgeoning male-dominated Minimalism motion of the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s earlier than later rejecting the artwork kind in favor of extra experimental and figurative compositions, is well known for a pioneering portray apply that frequently reworked over the course of a six-decade profession that by no means slowed.
Jo Baer, “Dusk (Bands and End-Points)” (2012), oil on canvas, 86 5/8 x 118 1/8 inches (220 x 300 cm) (© Jo Baer; picture courtesy Tempo Gallery)
Born Josephine Gail Kleinberg on August 7, 1929, in Seattle, Washington, the artist started pursuing artwork at a younger age on the encouragement of her mom, who enrolled her in artwork courses when she was 11 years outdated within the hopes that she would develop into a medical illustrator. As a biology scholar on the College of Washington, Baer enrolled in introductory portray and drawing programs earlier than later shifting to New York, the place she studied perceptual psychology and philosophy on the New Faculty for Social Analysis.
Her inventive profession started when she moved to Los Angeles in 1953, the place she created — after which principally destroyed — work within the mode of Summary Expressionism. In 1960, upon her return to New York, she pivoted to a brand new type when she turned concerned within the metropolis’s rising Minimalism motion. It was presently that she started exploring non-objective, hard-edged portray, drawing reward for her strikingly reductive canvases at a time when consideration was largely targeted on the output of male sculptors.
Jo Baer, “The Risen (Big-Belly)” (1960-1961/2019), oil on canvas, 72 3/8 x 72-3/8 inches (183.8 x 183.8 cm) (© Jo Baer; picture courtesy Tempo Gallery)
Nonetheless, regardless of being an outlier each for her gender and medium of expression, her early works, which predominantly comprised stark white and grey work bounded by black edges and had been usually exhibited low to the bottom or as diptychs, had been offered alongside different main Minimalist figures together with Kenneth Noland, Robert Mangold, Frank Stella, Dan Flavin, and Sol LeWitt all through the ’60s. She was included in landmark group reveals similar to Kaymar Gallery’s Eleven Artists (1964), the Guggenheim Museum’s Systemic Portray (1966), and Dwan Gallery’s 10 (1966). In 1966, New York’s Fischbach Gallery mounted her first solo exhibition, which was adopted by a mid-career retrospective on the Whitney Museum of American Artwork lower than a decade later in 1975.
Famously unafraid and sharp-tongued, Baer additionally drew consideration early on in her profession for her theoretical writings, which consisted of letters to editors, statements, and articles that at occasions ostracized her from her friends for her dependable protection of portray, difficult assertions by artists like Donald Judd and Robert Morris who insisted that the medium had been rendered out of date.
Jo Baer, “Snow-Laden Primeval (Meditations, on Log Phase and Decline rampant with Flatulent Cows and Carbon Cars)” (2020), oil paint on canvas, 67 11/16 x 60 1/4 inches (171.9 x 153 cm) (© Jo Baer; picture courtesy Tempo Gallery)
Within the Nineteen Seventies, following her Whitney retrospective, Baer moved to Europe, the place she finally settled in Amsterdam after dwelling in Eire and London. It was throughout this relocation that she deserted abstraction for a brand new visible language, which she described as “radical figuration” in a well-known 1983 letter to Artwork in America the place she declared that she was “no longer an abstract artist.” This aesthetic pivot noticed her create photos that drew from prehistoric cave motifs, female archetypal symbols, geography, and astronomical kinds, grounding her apply in historic historical past, mythology, and figurative expression. In more moderen many years, she integrated digital collages that had been subsequently printed out and drawn on, as proven in Jo Baer: In direction of the Land of the Giants on the Camden Arts Centre in London in 2015.
“I wanted more subject matter and more meaning,” Baer later defined concerning the transformation in her work. “There was an awful lot going on in the world, and I didn’t just want to sit there and draw straight lines.”
Baer’s work has been exhibited at venues internationally and is at the moment on view within the Museum of Trendy Artwork’s group exhibition Very important Indicators: Artists and the Physique, which runs by means of February 22. Her work will be discovered within the collections of public establishments together with the Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Artwork Institute of Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork; the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; the Louisiana Museum of Trendy Artwork in Denmark, and others.
Jo Baer, “Untitled (Pale Blue)” (1964/65), oil on canvas, 48 x 48 inches (121.9 x 121.9 cm) (© Jo Baer; picture courtesy Tempo Gallery)