Jo Baer
The Risen / Originals
New York, 540 West 25th Street
Jo Baer: The Risen will feature five of Baer’s Risen works, unprecedented Minimalist paintings originally created in 1960 and 1961 that were subsequently destroyed and then remade by the artist in 2019 from archival images. Jo Baer: Originals brings together twelve works from 1975 through the present that reflect the artist’s departure from Minimalism towards a new, image-based aesthetic in her practice. Spanning nearly five decades, this presentation is the first time a survey of Baer’s image-based work has been exhibited in the U.S. Together, these exhibitions offer an overarching look at Baer’s prolific career that continues to defy categorization and has significantly influenced a younger generation of artists.
For over five decades, Baer has relentlessly investigated the problems intrinsic to modern painting, pushing its formal and experiential possibilities in new and radical directions. In the 1960s and 70s, her groundbreaking hard-edge paintings were included in many landmark exhibitions of New York Minimalism, including the Guggenheim’s Systemic Painting and 10 at the Dwan Gallery, both in 1966, alongside works by her largely male peers, including Kenneth Noland, Robert Mangold, and Frank Stella, among others. Following an exhibition of her work at the Whitney Museum of Art in 1975, Baer distanced herself from the styles and precepts of the movement, feeling it was no longer relevant and critiquing the stance of leading Minimalist artists, such as Donald Judd and Robert Morris, in various published texts. In Baer’s words: “In the late 60s and 70s the vocabulary on which abstract art depended was destroyed. We lost our common language; we no longer shared one language that people understood. And once that happened, you had to go look for another language.” Shortly after her exhibition at the Whitney Museum, Baer relocated permanently to Europe in 1975 and began to explore new approaches to painting.
Jo Baer with The Risen (Wink), 1960–61 © Jo Baer
Jo Baer: The Risen—on view on the 7th floor of Pace’s West 25th Street building—features the artist’s reprise of abstract canvases first conceived in the 1960s. These monumental geometric paintings in bold, contrasting colors were some of the first paintings Baer created in her early career and were radically different from the works of Abstract Expressionist and Minimalist painters working in New York in 1960 and 1961. Concerned that the world was not “ready” for these paintings, they were consequently destroyed by the artist. Before doing so, however, Baer posed confidently with each of the paintings in a series of photographs—a performative act that secured their afterlife in another time. Using these images in her archive, Baer began to revisit her earlier ideas of form and color and in 2019 was inspired to reconstruct her first paintings, effectively reawakening this body of work and titling the series The Risen. For Baer, while her earlier abstract works appear to be in opposition with her image-based works, they also offer a trajectory from which to map an aesthetic and technical exploration of painting over time, particularly in her approach to light, perception and color. Revisiting her first abstract paintings, while continuing to create new image-based works, embodies the artist’s essential and perpetual dedication to her medium, aligning her past and present practices.
