Jennifer Bartlett: Homan-ji

On view September 7 through October 29, 2012, The Drawing Room is pleased to present "Jennifer Bartlett: Homan-ji", an exhibition of vivid paintings on handmade mulberry paper inspired by Bartlett's extraordinary commission to create a ceiling installation for the Homan-ji Temple in Choshi-shi, Japan. Stimulated by her first experience working with Japanese pigments, metal leaf and fresh imagery culled from her travels, Bartlett made two more Homan-ji sequences: a suite of 112 paintings in 1992, and in 1995 another large group that is the basis for Homan-ji III, a permanent installation of 220 glass panels at the Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC. In the current show, selections from these series reveal the dynamic interplay of Bartlett’s distinctive combination of minimalist abstraction with figurative imagery, as paintings of the everyday bottle of milk, or a catch of fresh fish hang side-by-side with elegant latticed compositions and dot patterns on the grid.

The commission for the ceiling in Choshi-shi began with an invitation from the Buddhist temple’s ninth generation monk who was intent to complete the restoration project his father began after World War II. In 1991 the monk proposed his idea to Hiroshi Kawanishi, a master printmaker, publisher and friend of Bartlett who took her to temples throughout Japan and guided her through Choshi-shi’s fishing community. These local sites fueled her imagination and influenced her choice to work with traditional materials the have endured for centuries. To bring the project into the 20th century, Bartlett implemented one of her favorite organizational systems as a point of departure, enlarging the grid she had used as the armature for multi-paneled paintings since the early 1970s. Bartlett engaged Kawanishi to silkscreen a network of intersecting grey lines onto the Kozo paper sheets on which she then painted the temple’s sequence of 321 paintings in seven color cycles.

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