In the House

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is pleased to announce pioneering American artist Jennifer Bartlett’s (1941-2022) first significant exhibition in London since her solo show at Tate in 1982. This is the second in a trilogy of exhibitions exploring central motifs in Bartlett’s practice, following 'On the Water' at Marianne Boesky Gallery and coming ahead of 'In the Woods' at Paula Cooper Gallery.

Amongst the best-known painters of her generation, Bartlett 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. 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 NYC subway signs. The resulting combinations allowed for compositions that were intimate and monumental, representational and abstract, and which brought together system-based aesthetics with a range of figurative painting styles.

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 MoMA, NY – the house presented a thematic odyssey that she would continue to explore. Comprised of 987 plates, Rhapsody brought Bartlett to widespread acclaim. It introduced the house as one of four simple motifs that could be distilled to an essential form, alongside the tree, the mountain and the ocean. Although Bartlett would go on to explore each in depth, it was the house that caught her imagination first. By deconstructing the rudimentary triangle-atop-square form, she systematically dismantled any fixed definition of home, at the same time using it as a conduit to explore different emotional states.