The painter Jo Baer, whose artistic path traveled from sharp minimalism to self-described ‘radical figuration’, died yesterday, January 21, in Amsterdam at the age of 95. The news of her death was announced by Pace Gallery, which has represented the artist since 2019.
Baer, who initially rose to prominence during the emerging male-dominated minimalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s before later rejecting the art form in favor of more experimental and figurative compositions, is widely recognized for his groundbreaking painting practice that developed over the course of time was constantly changing. from a six-decade career that never slowed down.
Born Josephine Gail Kleinberg on August 7, 1929 in Seattle, Washington, the artist began practicing art at an early age with the encouragement of her mother, who enrolled her in art classes at age 11 in the hopes that she would become a medical illustrator . As a biology student at the University of Washington, Baer took introductory painting and drawing courses before later moving to New York, where she studied perceptual psychology and philosophy at the New School for Social Research.
Her artistic career began when she moved to Los Angeles in 1953, where she created – and then largely destroyed – paintings in the style of abstract expressionism. In 1960, upon her return to New York, she switched to a new style as she became involved in the city’s growing minimalism movement. It was at this time that she began to explore non-objective, hard painting, winning praise for her strikingly reductive canvases at a time when attention was largely focused on the production of male sculptors.
Despite being an outlier both because of her gender and her means of expression, her early works, which consisted mainly of stark white and gray paintings bordered by black borders and typically exhibited low to the ground or as diptychs, were presented alongside other leading minimalist figures. including Kenneth Noland, Robert Mangold, Frank Stella, Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt throughout the 1960s. She was included in historical group exhibitions such as that of Kaymar Gallery Eleven artists (1964), the Guggenheim Museum Systemic painting (1966), and Dwan Gallery 10 (1966). In 1966, the Fischbach Gallery in New York staged her first solo exhibition, which was followed by a mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art less than ten years later in 1975.
Known as fearless and sharp-tongued, Baer attracted attention early in her career for her theoretical writings, which consisted of letters to editors, statements, and articles that sometimes ostracized her from her colleagues for her staunch defense of painting. challenging claims by artists such as Donald Judd and Robert Morris who insisted that the medium was outdated.
In the 1970s, following her Whitney retrospective, Baer moved to Europe, eventually settling in Amsterdam after living in Ireland and London. During this move she abandoned abstraction for a new visual language, which she introduced in a famous letter from 1983 Art in America where she declared that she was “no longer an abstract artist.” This aesthetic pivot saw her create images that draw on prehistoric cave motifs, feminine archetypal symbols, geography, and astronomical shapes, grounding her practice in ancient history, mythology, and figurative expression. In more recent decades she incorporated digital collages that were then printed and drawn on, as seen in Jo Baer: On the way to the land of the giants at the Camden Arts Center in London in 2015.
“I wanted more subject and more meaning,” later Baer explained about the transformation in her work. “There was a lot going on in the world, and I didn’t want to just sit there and draw straight lines.”
Baer’s work has been exhibited internationally and is currently on view in the Museum of Modern Art’s group exhibition Vital functions: artists and the bodywhich runs until February 22. Her paintings can be found in the collections of public institutions, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, and others.
