Jennifer Bartlett: Selected Work 1970-2003

From June 27 through July 28, The Drawing Room in East Hampton is pleased to present a small selection of works by Jennifer Bartlett that spotlights salient aspects of her practice over more than four decades. The show coincides with The Parrish Art Museum’s extensive survey, "Jennifer Bartlett: History of the Universe – Works 1970-2011", on view in Water Mill, New York through July 13, 2014.

After completing her MFA at Yale University and moving to New York in 1967, Jennifer Bartlett developed an important new painting methodology that became central within her expansive oeuvre. Inspired by Minimalism, Conceptualism and her search for a resilient graphed painting surface, the artist fabricated 12” square steel plates coated with baked white enamel and screen printed with a grid. On these smooth surfaces, Bartlett applied vibrant dots of enamel paint, guided by a series of self-imposed and systematic rules. Her early paintings, which quickly drew broad critical acclaim, ranged from individual panels to enormous modular configurations such as Rhapsody (1975-76), a seminal work comprising 987 plates now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. A classic example of Bartlett’s signature plate work from the period is a vertical arrangement of six abstract square panels titled One Through Six System Using Six Colors (1970). This meticulous dotted painting celebrates mathematical precision and infinite pattern in a form remarkably prescient of the digital pixel now ubiquitous in the 21st century.

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