Jo Baer, painter who pivoted from abstraction to ‘radical figuration’, has died, aged 95 – The Art Newspaper

The American painter Jo Baer, finest recognized for her monumental contributions to the fields of Minimalist abstraction and later figuration, has died, aged 95.

Baer was born Josephine Gail Kleinberg in Seattle, Washington, in 1929. On the encouragement of her mom, who hoped she would develop into a medical illustrator, Baer studied biology on the College of Washington, the place she additionally enrolled in introductory portray and drawing programs. She later accomplished a graduate diploma in psychology from the New Faculty for Social Analysis in New York, whereas working for an inside design studio as a draftsperson.

In 1953, Baer moved to Los Angeles and married tv author Richard Baer, with whom she had a son in 1955, the artwork advisor Josh Baer of The Baer Faxt e-newsletter. The couple divorced and Baer married the painter John Wesley in 1960, with whom she divorced in 1970. The couple had relocated to New York in 1960, throughout a time when Baer had shifted her focus to portray and drawing full time.

In New York, Baer emerged as a central determine within the Minimalist motion. All through the Sixties and 70s, she explored non-objectivity in her black and white hard-edge work that centered on the nuances of kind, color and spatial relationships. Her work was characterised by exact geometric types and a restrained palette, emphasising the portray as an object in its personal proper.

Throughout this time, Baer exhibited her work in New York with main galleries like Fischbach and Dwan, and was incessantly featured alongside friends like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt. Her work was included in Documenta in 1968, and within the groundbreaking 1966 exhibition Systemic Portray on the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which explored the rising discipline of geometric abstraction. In 1975, Baer had a mid-career retrospective on the Whitney Museum of American Artwork that includes her Minimalist work.

Looking for new creative horizons, Baer left New York for Europe the identical 12 months, expressing that she wished to work in an surroundings that was much less hostile towards girls and fewer centered on commerce. Her work additionally started to maneuver away from pure abstraction, incorporating figural parts, textual content and symbols that challenged earlier boundaries of Minimalist aesthetics. Baer spent some years in Eire and London earlier than settling in Amsterdam in 1984, the place she continued to work till the tip of her life.

Baer coined the time period “radical figuration” in a letter to Artwork in America in 1983, the place she acknowledged that she was “now not an summary artist”. She described a blurring between abstraction and figuration, creating works that integrated fragmented or edited photos. On her choice to depart from Minimalism, Baer mentioned she “wished extra material and extra that means” in her work.

Baer wrote prolifically about her life and method to art-making, a few of which was printed in Broadsides and Belles Lettres: Chosen Writings and Interviews 1965-2010. In a 2020 studio go to interview with Artnet Information, when requested what trait she admired and disliked in a murals, Baer responded: “I love originality and ‘the real’. I dislike clichéd, worn-out work (summary and in any other case).”

Baer’s work is held in main museum collections, together with the Nationwide Gallery of Artwork in Washington, DC, the Museum of Fashionable Artwork (MoMA) in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Tate in London and the Nationwide Gallery of Australia in Canberra.

As well as, Baer participated in varied necessary group exhibitions lately, together with the 2014 São Paulo Biennial, the 2017 Whitney Biennial and the exhibition Making House: Ladies Artists and Postwar Abstraction at MoMA in 2017, which sought to highlight girls artists whose work had been eclipsed by their male contemporaries. The final retrospective of Baer’s work was held by the Stedelijk Museum in 1999. Baer had her most up-to-date exhibition in 2023 on the Irish Museum of Fashionable Artwork in Dublin, titled Coming Residence Late: Jo Baer Within the Land of the Giants.

Baer’s demise on 21 January was introduced in the present day (22 January) by Tempo Gallery, which has represented the artist since 2019. Her first exhibition with the gallery got here in 2020, a two-part present that featured minimalist work she created within the Sixties that had been destroyed and remade from archival photos, alongside a number of works courting from between 1975 and 2020 that traced the evolution of her apply.

In a press release, Tempo Gallery president Samanthe Rubell says Baer was “a visionary painter who made a reputation for herself within the male-dominated New York artwork world of the Sixties”.

She provides: “Working carefully with Jo, I used to be all the time struck by her power and fearlessness—and her potential to reinvent herself and her method to portray over the course of her profession. Jo’s energy might be deeply felt in Tempo’s programme and group for a few years to return.”