Jennifer Bartlett

Jennifer Bartlett was a highly influential American artist known for her innovative approach to painting and installation art, blending rigorous conceptual frameworks with a deeply personal aesthetic. Born in 1941 in Long Beach, California, Bartlett studied at Mills College and later at the Yale School of Art and Architecture, where she earned her MFA in 1965. Her education at Yale placed her at the heart of the burgeoning minimalist movement, but Bartlett quickly developed her own distinctive style that defied easy categorisation.

In 1967, Bartlett moved to SoHo in New York. There, she found a tight-knit art community including many of her fellow students from Yale such as Jenny Snider, Richard Serra, Nancy Graves, Chuck Close, among others. Bartlett was best known for her paintings and prints in which familiar subjects — ranging from houses and gardens to oceans and skies — are executed in a style that combines elements of both representational and abstract art. Her early influences included Arshile Gorky, Piet Mondrian and Sol LeWitt. By the late 1960s, inspired by the work of John Cage, Bartlett began incorporating change elements into her work.

Bartlett gained widespread recognition in the 1970s with her monumental work Rhapsody (1975–76), a groundbreaking installation that stretched over 153 feet and consisted of 987 steel plates, each hand-painted with enamel. This piece demonstrated her unique blend of minimalism and expressive figuration, using simple geometric forms to explore complex ideas about time, memory, and repetition. Rhapsody was both a painting and a narrative, challenging the boundaries of what a single artwork could encompass.

Throughout her career, Bartlett was known for her use of the grid, a structure she employed not just as a compositional tool but as a way to explore the interplay between order and chaos. Her work often juxtaposed meticulous, systematic arrangements with more spontaneous, expressive elements, creating a dynamic tension that invited viewers to engage deeply with the process of seeing and interpreting.

Despite her association with the Minimalist and conceptual art movements, Bartlett’s work was deeply personal and emotional, often reflecting her own life experiences and memories. Her ability to combine intellectual rigor with emotional depth made her one of the most compelling and original voices in contemporary art. Jennifer Bartlett died in 2022 at the age of 81.

Today, her works can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Tate Gallery in London, and more.