Jo Baer

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Jo Baer 2011

Jo Baer , as Josephine Gail Kleinberg (born August 7, 1929 in Seattle , Washington , USA ), has lived and worked in Amsterdam , Netherlands since 1994 . She is an American painter and graphic artist . She is considered an important representative of minimalism in art.

life and work

Jo Baer studied biology at the University of Washington in Seattle from 1946 to 1949 . She took evening classes in painting and drawing. In 1950 she worked on a kibbutz in Israel and moved to New York City .

Jo Baer's early works are still characterized by an admiration for the Abstract Expressionists , especially the artists Arshile Gorky , Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko . She later turned to hard-edge painting. She gained her own artistic expression in minimalism and is considered one of the pioneers of minimalism in art.

In the late 1950s, her work is characterized by her "edgy" style, which ties in with her early hard-edge work. Her minimalist paintings often consist of series of large and small squares or vertical and horizontal rectangles. She puts a special emphasis on the contours and the boundary lines of the picture. Since the mid-1960s she also created numerous horizontally or vertically arranged diptychs and triptychs .

In 1968 her works were shown at the 4th documenta in Kassel in the painting department. In 1975, at the height of her career, there was a major retrospective at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art . After this exhibition, she turned away from the pressures of the New York art market and devoted herself to her structural images. She moved first to Ireland, then to London and finally to Amsterdam.

She had her first solo exhibition in 1969 in the Rolf Ricke Gallery . In 2013 the Museum Ludwig was the first German institution to dedicate a solo exhibition to Jo Baer. Largely unknown drawings are supplemented by significant works on canvas, around 170 works and thus Baer's most extensive retrospective to date.

Works in collections

Her work is part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art , New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Art Institute of Chicago , the Seattle Art Museum , the Museum of Modern Art , Frankfurt, and the Kröller-Müller Museum , Otterlo and the National Gallery of Art , Washington, DC

Literature and Sources

  • Exhibition catalog for the IV. Documenta: IV. Documenta. International exhibition ; Catalog: Volume 1: (Painting and Sculpture); Volume 2: (Graphics / Objects); Kassel 1968
  • Harald Kimpel and Karin Stengel: documenta IV 1968 international exhibition - A photographic reconstruction (series of publications from the documenta archive); Bremen 2007, ISBN 978-3-86108-524-9
  • Julia Friedrich: Jo Baer - drawings and paintings since 1960 , bookstore Walter König, Cologne 2013 (with a foreword by Philipp Kaiser and contributions by Julia Friedrich, Jutta Koether, Lucy Lippard, Lauren O'Neill-Butler and David Raskin (in German and English language))

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Lucius Grisebach: "It took me quite unspeakably packed at that time" . In: Neues Museum, State Museum for Art and Design in Nuremberg (ed.): Simply art. Rolf Ricke Collection . Verlag für modern art, Nuremberg 2002, ISBN 3-933096-86-3 , p. 8-15 .
  2. Does anyone really need a triangle now? In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung of May 26, 2013, page 45.