Layers of Meaning

Jennifer Bartlett - art on a grid

Jennifer Bartlett: painter, printmaker and sculptor, has been active on the New York and California art scenes since the early 1970s. Her work is dominated by systems and grids, which provide a means of organizing explorations into lively chaos, such as her series of overgrown gardens or 'elements' (investigations of the four elements: air, water, fire and earth.) Most of her works have been explorations of theme and variations. The beginnings of Bartlett's paintings are often one foot square 'canvases' (sometimes steel plates), which she then assembles in the grid to form the final images.

The Smithsonian's description of her artistic ambitions "Her early work, which was strictly limited to grids, graphs, and dots, has evolved to include an expanded view of the possibilities of classifying and cataloging." Classifying and cataloging ... there seems to be lots of room for explorations there.

The MIT student loan art program describes Bartlett's process: "Bartlett's approach was more idiosyncratic and she would violate the systematically determined series when it suited her purposes to do so. Each series of plates creates a wall full of exuberantly rhythmic patterns.

According to Bartlett, the evident fascination with the series in her art can be explained by the fact that, "The series permits a range of possibilities; it reminds us that things can change." In the words of critic Maurice Berger, Bartlett's art "juxtaposes the raw and the cooked, examining the way the world is filtered through the human mind and is encoded into cultural conventions or sign systems."

image by Jennifer Bartlett from the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco