Jennifer Bartlett
Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, 6 Heddon St, W1B 4BT
6 June-5 July
By Louisa Buck and Ben Luke
Jennifer Bartlett (1941-2022) was a significant figure in 1970s New York, and had a show at the Tate Gallery in 1982, but it is a marker of her relative obscurity in the UK that this is her first significant London solo exhibition since then. She emerged from the period of Minimalism and Conceptualism with a distinctive systematic, abstract approach to painting on steel plates. But by the 1980s, she had diversified her language, and four motifs dominated her paintings from that period: the tree, the mountain, the sea and the house. The humble domestic building dominates the forms of this exhibition—a simple combination of shapes that proved an inexhaustible spur for Bartlett’s painterly imagination.
