On November 7, Marianne Boesky Gallery will open The House was Quiet and the World was Calm: Jennifer Bartlett 1970 – 2014,  marking the gallery’s first solo presentation of the acclaimed artist’s  work since it began representing her in fall 2018. The image of the  archetypal house has permeated Bartlett’s work across media since the  1970s, encapsulating within its recognizable form both simple geometry  and poignant symbolism. Through a selection of paintings and mixed-media  installations, the upcoming exhibition captures Bartlett’s multifaceted  and conceptually rigorous examinations of the idea of the house. The House was Quiet and the World was Calm will be on view at the gallery’s 509 W. 24th Street location through December 21, 2019. 

Bartlett first came to prominence with the large-scale installation, Rhapsody,  which debuted at Paula Cooper Gallery in 1976. It has subsequently been  presented on three separate occasions at the Museum of Modern Art,  which holds it as part of its collection. Rhapsody features 987  steel plates arranged on the wall in sections dedicated to colors,  shapes, and lines, as well as forms like the house and tree. Bartlett  envisioned the sprawling grid as a systematic examination of the breadth  of formal tendencies within the painting genre. With each painted plate  acting as both an autonomous work and a part of the greater whole, Rhapsody redefined  the conceptual possibilities of painting and its relationship to  monumental installation, positioning Bartlett as a visionary force. At  the same time, Rhapsody captured Bartlett’s innate ability to  fuse minimalist vocabulary with expressive gesture—a formal approach  that would characterize her work throughout her career. 

Bartlett began examining the simple motif of the house, though, even before the presentation of Rhapsody  brought her acclaim. For Bartlett, the appeal of the house lies, in  part, in its incredible universality. The simple square crowned with a  triangle conjures an expansive array of emotions, memories, and  associations across the spectrum of individuals. And in the U.S., it  holds a particular place in the national psyche—a symbol of the deeply  entrenched notion of the American dream. Subjected to Bartlett’s ongoing  and systematic explorations of painting and printing techniques,  however, the house in instances is flattened, reformulated, and  distorted to a range of formal and emotional effects.

In House: Hatches (c. 1970-74), featured in the upcoming  show, the house emerges amidst an aggressive tumult of hatch lines. The  perspective slightly askew, the house appears as though it is  warped—crushed by or being swept into the surrounding atmosphere. Here,  Bartlett’s uncanny ability to use a simple technique, foundational to  drawing, to evoke an emotional response is on full display, as the  aggressive lines threaten our sensibilities around hearth and home. The  unexpected infusion of emotion is equally present in Houses: Thin Lines  (1998). At first glance, the installation appears as a purely formal  experiment—36 steel plates, each painted with hand-lined grids and  bisected diagonally with thin lines of yellow, green, and red. As one  moves further from the wall, however, a series of houses, at varying  scales, appears across the plates, transforming the work into a desolate  and melancholy landscape. 

The emergence of the house from seemingly abstract fields, whether  produced through lines, dots, geometric forms, or swaths of color, is a  constant in Bartlett’s work of the late 1990s. This approach is  represented in the upcoming exhibition with Large House: Dots (1998), 3-D House, Grid (1998-99), Forest and Houses (1999), and Glass House on Plate  (1999-2000). Together, these works highlight Bartlett’s ongoing  engagement with the grid and the unexpected opportunities it offers to  express a psychology of mood. In this way, Bartlett’s practice has  consistently pushed and melded the boundaries between the emotionality  of Abstract Expressionism and the subsequent rigidity of Minimalism. 

In the 2000s, some of Bartlett’s work took a more directly expressive  turn, as she produced richly layered oil paintings of the views around  her home in Long Island. This work is represented in the exhibition by Amagansett Diptych #3,  which captures two side-by-side views of her home on the beach. Moody  and bursting with unspoken narrative, the paintings encapsulate  Bartlett’s ability to both leverage and break free from her self-imposed  grid systems. Together, the works in The House was Quiet and the World was Calm: Jennifer Bartlett 1970 – 2014 engage viewers in the incredible depth and intricacy of Bartlett’s practice, through her intense exploration of a single theme.   

Jennifer Bartlett’s first survey exhibition was held in 1985 and  traveled to the Walker Art Center, MN; the Brooklyn Museum, NY; and the  Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, PA, among others. In 2006, the  Addison Gallery of American Art surveyed Bartlett’s early enameled steel  plate paintings in the period from 1968–76. In 2013–14, Klaus Ottmann  curated her second traveling survey Jennifer Bartlett: History of the  Universe—Works 1970–2011, which visited the Pennsylvania Academy of the  Fine Arts, PA and the Parrish Art Museum, NY. In 2014, the Cleveland  Museum of Art united her three monumental plate pieces, Rhapsody, Song,  and Recitative in the exhibition Epic Systems. Bartlett’s works are  represented in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, TX;  the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; the Metropolitan Museum of  Art, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; the Museum of Modern Art,  NY; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; the San Francisco Museum of  Modern Art, CA; the Tate Modern, London; and the Whitney Museum of  American Art, NY, among many others. Born in Long Beach, California,  Bartlett studied at Mills College in California and received her MFA  from Yale University in 1965. Bartlett is represented jointly by  Marianne Boesky Gallery and Paula Cooper Gallery. She currently lives  and works in Amagansett, NY.                            

For more information about Jennifer Bartlett, please contact gallery  Partner and Director Ricky Manne at [email protected] or  212.680.9889. For press inquiries, please contact Alina Sumajin, PAVE  Communications and Consulting, at [email protected] or 646.369.2050.