Jennifer Bartlett emerged out of 1970s New York as one of the leading painters of her generation, despite the artistic milieu of the time being dominated by male artists such as Richard Serra and Chuck Close. Her genre-defying oeuvre draws upon the visual languages of Minimalism and seriality, Conceptual Art, and Expressionism, and encompasses a variety of media, including her signature steel plates, canvas, and sculptural installation. 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. In this innovative style, her 47-metre-long magnum opus Rhapsody debuted at Paula Cooper Gallery in 1976 and is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 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.
Working across canvas, her signature steel plates, and in large-scale sculptures, Bartlett focused on four figurative motifs that could be distilled to an essential form: the house, the tree, the mountain and the ocean. 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.