Jennifer Bartlett

Jennifer Bartlett ( Losch; March 14, 1941 – July 25, 2022) was an American artist and novelist. She was best 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 were executed on small, square, enamel-coated steel plates that are combined in grid formations to create very large works.

Early life and education Bartlett was born Jennifer Losch in 1941 in Long Beach, California, one of four children. During her college years, she met Elizabeth Murray, who became a lifelong friend. She then moved to New Haven to study at the Yale School of Art and Architecture

Bartlett described the experience of study at Yale as her broadest influence: "I'd walked into my life".

Work

Element from the Swimmers Atlanta at the Russell Federal Building & U.S. Courthouse, Atlanta, Georgia, 2009

Bartlett was best known for her paintings and prints in which familiar subjects — ranging from houses and gardens to oceans and skies — are executed in a style that combines elements of both representational and abstract art; indeed, she commented that she did not accept a distinction between figurative and abstract art. Her installations often consisted of multiple canvases as well as three dimensional objects. House with Open Door from 1988, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, consists of an oil paint on canvas diptych and the same house constructed out of wood. The Dallas Museum of Art, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Modern Art (New York City), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City) are among the public collections holding her work.

Most critics perceived Bartlett's work as inventive, energetic, wide-ranging, and ambitious, Her work was included in the 2024 exhibition Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).

Early experimental work Early on, Bartlett made a number of three-dimensional works that she subjected to extreme conditions such as freezing and smashing. Subsequent series such as In the Garden and Amagansett have become more painterly while still retaining their systematizing rigor. and, though she was at first reluctant, she grew to enjoy her first attempt at digital painting and discussed the implications of this new medium as she worked.

Air: 24 Hours (1991-92) A collaboration between Bartlett and the fiction writer Deborah Eisenberg, Air: 24 Hours first appeared as a book of 24 paintings by Bartlett with accompanying text by Eisenberg. It is both banal and colorful: sometimes representational, sometimes abstract. In it, Bartlett alternates between a first- and third-person voice to address and recount the subjects of family, marriage, career, friends, and death. They divorced in the early 1990s.

Selected exhibitions Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, 1976. Rhapsody. Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, 2011. The Studio Inside Out. Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2011. Rhapsody and other works. Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, 2012, Addresses (1976–1978)" Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, 2013, Chaos Theory Parrish Art Museum, 2014. Jennifer Bartlett: History of the Universe — Works 1970–2011. Touring survey. Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, 2015. In the Garden Paula Cooper Gallery, 2016. The Phillips Collection, 2024, In and Out of the Garden

Honors and collections Bartlett was a recipient of the 2019 Francis J. Greenburger Award. Bartlett received the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in 1983 and the American Institute of Architects Award in 1986.

Bartlett's work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), the Tate Gallery (London), Benesse Museum (Naoshima) and other institutions.