Jo Baer

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Jo Baer, born 1929, is an American artist identified as a pioneer in minimalist art.

Style

Baer's minimalist work consists of a reductive hard-edge style, encompassing a series of large and small squares, and vertical and horizontal rectangles with fully enclosing borders. Baer began to expand her palette by painting flanking and stacked diptych and triptych groupings, while working with wraparound paintings in diagonal and curved forms.

Career

Early work

Baer's early work is informed by an admiration of the Abstract Expressionists, including Gorky, Motherwell, and Rothko—a movement she later rejected, in favor of a painterly hard-edge.

Mature work

The later works speak to Baer's own refutation of minimalism as a vessel for the death of painting, in favor of object-making. In 1975, at the height of her career and on the heels of a major retrospective at New York's Whitney Museum, Baer left behind the pressures of the New York art market and shifted from abstraction to a more representational style, rooted in metaphoric imagery.

Collections

Her work is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate Modern, London; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Seattle Art Museum.

In June, 2007, she participated at the symposium "Personal Structures Time - Space - Existence", a project initiated by the artist Rene Rietmeyer.

External links

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Last updated on Monday March 10, 2008 at 18:31:45 PDT (GMT -0700)
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