BY ALEX GREENBERGER
Marianne Boesky Gallery, of New York and Aspen, and Paula Cooper Gallery, of New York, will co-represent the artist Jennifer Bartlett, whose rigorously crafted paintings and sculptures subject abstraction to the rubrics of Conceptualism. Both galleries will show the artist’s work at their booths at Art Basel Miami Beach in December, with a solo exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery’s Chelsea space to follow in the winter of next year.
Locks Gallery in Philadelphia, a longtime exhibitor of the artist, will continue to show past work by Bartlett but will no longer represent her.
For the past five decades, Bartlett, who is based in Amagansett, New York, has been engineering a kind of art-making that has brought together the aesthetics of modernist abstraction and the emphasis on rules-based systems of Minimalism and Conceptualism. As exemplified by her 1975–76 piece Rhapsody, an installation first shown at Paula Cooper Gallery that features symbols and images unfolding across a grid of 987 plates, Bartlett is known for paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptures that test the boundaries between original handmade gestures and those prescribed by systems.
Her work was recently the subject of a survey that opened first at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in Philadelphia in 2013 and later traveled to the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York. Earlier this year, Locks Gallery hosted an exhibition of Bartlett’s prints and paintings featuring houses.
In a statement, Marianne Boesky said, “I admire Jennifer’s ambition and her courage to constantly challenge herself and her audience through painting. She began her career as a rare female minimalist painter during the 1970s and has maintained an ever-evolving practice. Her most recent works continue to showcase her unbound curiosity and ability as a painter—something that is markedly difficult to find. Her work deserves much greater visibility.”
