Page 48 May 9, 2014
DAN’S PAPERS
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PARRISH ART MUSEUM
ART EVENTS
Jennifer Barlett on view through July 13.
Openings, closings see and be seen.
Jennifer Bartlett at the Parrish Art Museum The grid is everywhere,” explained Klaus Ottmann, from the hallway of the Parrish Art Museum, among a crowd who came for his talk and tour on April 27. Ottmann, currently a Director and Curator at Large at The Phillips Collection, was the Robert Lehman Curator for the Parrish Art Museum from 2008 to 2010 and is the curator of the current exhibition, Jennifer Bartlett: History of The Universe, Works 1970–2011. “The subject of her early work, the grid, gives a sense of place in
Paul Kim/society-in-focus.com
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her later work, embodied in the house,” Ottmann continued, as Parrish Executive Director Terrie Sultan pointed out the house-like structure of the Museum’s hallway, where exposed wood beams form an iconic house shape. Place became a major theme in Bartlett’s work, while the house became a motif that represented the universe—perfect in all of its imperfections. “It simplifies human existence while being very abstract,” Ottmann remarked. Bartlett was born in Long Beach, California in 1941. She graduated from Mills College in Oakland and received an MFA from Yale School of Art and
Klaus Ottmann and Jennifer Bartlett
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By stephanie de troy
Architecture in 1965. She settled in SoHo in 1968; a time when Minimalism and Conceptualism were gaining recognition. Influenced by both, Bartlett’s grid demonstrates self-imposed structure. From this rule-based construction, she allows herself an expressionist freedom, and freedom to incorporate both elements of representation and abstraction in such a way that is constrained and yet unquestionably felt. Perhaps it is this push and pull, a tension between order and chaos, which has made her work so successful. Large-scale works in the first room of the exhibition seemed to change in mood along with the shifting of light caused by the passing clouds above the skylights. Bartlett’s diptych “Rose,” 201011, embodied beauty and gravity, with a somber undertone that seemed to come and go. “History of the Universe” is also the title of Bartlett’s intimate autobiographical novel, published in 1985, and from all of the paintings in the exhibition there is a sense of autobiography. “Five P.M.,” 199192, on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is part of a series of 24 paintings made during 199192; each a 7’x7’ square, and each include two grid elements. Here, the overlaying grid of squares and the pattern-work grids within the lily pads create a flatness while the overhead perspective looks down into a koi pond. The fish seem to swim over and under the grid, as if it were part of the pond itself. There is a clock in the lower right hand corner revealing the time. “Something is usually wrong,” said Ottmann, of both life itself and of elements in her work, “The perfect shape of the house is distorted by what’s happening inside;” exemplified quite literally in “Double House,” 1987—an example of Bartlett’s innovative mixing of painting, which brushes up with photo-realism, and sculpture. Perhaps her repeated use of the diptych is a metaphor for the binary ways of looking at memories and events. Bartlett’s trademark steel plates come into play with “Atlantic Ocean,” 1984, (enamel over silkscreen grid on baked enamel steel plates) a massive work measuring 103”x 363”. Similar to “Rhapsody,” the 1976 work first shown at Paula Cooper Gallery and has since graced the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in 2006 and 2011, the white walls behind the steel plates become the grid. What Roberta Smith wrote in her 2011 review of “Rhapsody” for The New York Times can be applied to “Atlantic Ocean” as well: “The first impression overwhelms, yet the work unfolds intimately, plate by plate, in real time, with novelistic, cinematic and, as its title implies, musical overtones.” “Jennifer Bartlett: History of the Universe,” is on view at the Parrish through July 13. Visit parrishart.org.