BY TRAVIS DIEHL
CHELSEA
Jennifer Bartlett
Through Feb. 18. Marianne Boesky, 507 West 24th Street, Manhattan; 212-680-9889, marianneboeskygallery.com
From the 1970s until her death in 2022, Jennifer Bartlett melded the expressive tics of painting with the rigid grids of Conceptual Art. Whether slotting daubs of paint between the lines or sweeping color across them, the grid both confines and energizes simple subjects like mountains or trees, and intensifies elemental studies of form and color. Bartlett’s encyclopedic and wandering “Rhapsody,” from 1976, covers hundreds of square enameled panels printed with quarter-inch grids.
This show presents 77 of the artist’s early, obscure serial drawings on graph paper made from 1970 to 1973. They bare the systemic underpinnings of her more polished work. In one grouping, she experiments with iterative ways of filling the squares, or shading a given area with stripes and stipples. Another prismatic series arrays little swatches of colored pencil on fields of metallic silver paint. You can sense Bartlett’s restlessness in the way she colors outside the lines and allows mistakes to edge in.
A third series on view explores her favorite motif, the iconic house: a box with a triangle on top, inset with window and door. The sky is blue and the lawn is green. The progression of house drawings starts simply, plugging the component shapes dutifully into the grid. Then, several drawings in, Bartlett begins labeling the parts longhand, sometimes in ways that contradict the program — the word “sky” on a green triangle. The tangle of language at the top of one page trails off into a sparse gradient. In the rhythm of the plan’s unwinding comes pleasure in constraint. TRAVIS DIEHL
