Jennifer Bartlett (b. 1941, d. 2022) was known for her room-sized installations ranging in medium, that explored her immediate environments including houses, mountains, trees, gardens, and the ocean. Inspired by Minimalism, she started working on square steel enameled plates in 1968 on which she went on to create her most notable works. Rhapsody (1975–1976), a polyptych first installed at Paula Cooper Gallery filling the entirety of the gallery, included hundreds of these painted steel plates. That work is now part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her work moved from Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism to Conceptualism with some works touching on all at once. Working in two dimensions and occasionally moving to three, her works often started in a controlled, mathematical abstraction and moved to more painterly realism.
Bartlett’s work is featured in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, TX; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; the Tate Modern, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among many others. The first major museum survey exhibition of Bartlett’s work was organized in 1985—it traveled from the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN to the Brooklyn Museum, NY and then the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg, PA. In 2006, her early enameled steel plate paintings were surveyed at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover MA. In 2013 and 2014, a second survey of Bartlett’s work—Jennifer Bartlett: History of the Universe, curated by Klaus Ottmann—traveled to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, PA and the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY.