Viewing Jennifer Bartlett’s solo show Works on Paper, 1970-1973 at Marianne Boesky Gallery, it was as if I had happened upon a conspiracy theorist’s red-stringed evidence board. The artist is working out a grand idea that is truly understood only by her. The show features 77 small paper works from early in the artist’s career that explore color and form in Bartlett’s recognizably minimalist visual language.
Austere, yet surprisingly hypnotizing, Bartlett’s array of deeply systematic drawings stand at a crossroads of abstraction and representation, nearing the illustration of objects in space while remaining distinctly non-objective. Bartlett's house maps depict rows of tiny, colorful houses created from a few vertical and horizontal lines and two diagonals to show the triangular roof. The artist includes one-word notes delineating the locations of various elements of the house like the doors and bushes. The house drawings are reminiscent of rudimentary architectural diagrams when viewed up close, yet upon taking a few steps backwards and looking again, the same drawings feel as non-representational as the artist’s purely abstract compositions.
Using readymade graph paper, Bartlett achieves a level of stylistic uniformity that exposes her rigid process. Unlike her 1976 work Rhapsody, which spans 153 feet and contains an extraordinary variety of painting styles and color, these works on paper feel intentionally restrictive. Nonetheless, seeing these small, early works helps contextualize the massive, wall sized works that Bartlett would go on to make.
Hi! I think you did a wonderful job describing what the work looked like-- if I hadn't been yet, I think I'd be able to visualize it quite easily. Just a few small notes-- I think your conclusion is a good choice in seeing the show as a rare sighting of her early work which helps contextualize her other works. However, the conclusion on what the works are doing is a bit lacking, and I think it goes back to a sentence in the first paragraph, that the idea is only truly understood by her. I think its best to take that out and re-word it, as that is true in ways for so much work, and I have seen work in similar veins to this, so I don't know if it holds up, especially in the important place in your text it sits in. Maybe you're trying to say the work is too esoteric, or just that she's building her own visual system/ language? I think articulating either critique or analysis of themes of privacy and the personal/impersonal could help, either at the start or the end.
ReplyDeleteI think your interpretation of Jennifer Barlett’s gallery show is well-articulated and accurate according to what was presented. As someone who didn’t quite understand the collection of works upon first viewing them, it is clear that you quite literally read the fine print and even researched previous works to better understand these “works on paper”. I will say that I think your second paragraph does a better job as a hook than the first. If you were to reorder things or wanted to include more within the word count, I’d suggest incorporating the details of your intro into your second paragraph and cutting the first.
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