Amongst the best known painters of her generation, Jennifer Bartlett (1941-2022) realised a prodigious body of work that defied categorisation, subscribing variously to contemporary art movements including Minimalism, Conceptualism and Neo-Expressionism, although never at the expense of an artistic personality uniquely her own. Unfailingly innovative, in 1968 she began painting on a series of one-foot-square steel plates, coated with white baked enamel and silkscreened with a quarter-inch grid, this newly invented medium inspired by New York City subway signs. The resulting combinations allowed for compositions that were at once intimate and monumental, representational and abstract, and which brought together system-based aesthetics with a range of figurative painting styles. Bartlett was responsible for reinvigorating the practice of painting at a time when many had declared it obsolete, bringing a sense of emotion and subjectivity to programmatic strategy.
From the 1970s onwards the archetypal image of the house was a fundamental symbol in Bartlett’s visual arsenal. A key feature of her 47-metre-long magnum opus Rhapsody – debuted at Paula Cooper Gallery in 1976 and now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York – the house presented a thematic odyssey that she would continue to explore for the next 45 years. Comprised of 987 plates, Rhapsody brought Bartlett to widespread acclaim and became the catalyst for a level of attention that was rare for female painters of her generation.