Artist Trivia: Jennifer Bartlett

Who is this artist: 

This artist was born in 1941 in Long Beach, California. Their work combines abstraction and representation, and their subject matter concerning the everyday is structured in such a way so that it evokes a sense of profound meaning. This artist studied at Yale under Alex Katz and beside Brice Marden and Richard Serra. The artists did a series of works that includes 24 paintings, one for each hour of the day, and their 8pm is on view at the Farnsworth. The cycle documents the passage of time and follows a set of self imposed rules: such as, the paintings share an underlying grid-based structure and the constituent elements always add up to sixty. They make public some most personal aspects of daily life while retaining a sense of ironic distance and mysterious inaccessibility. This artist celebrated their 81st birthday on March 14 and is currently living in New York City.

This artist is: 

Jennifer Bartlett

Artist Jennifer Bartlett, whose work is currently on view at the Farnsworth, was born in 1941 in Long Beach, California. Her work on display in the Farnsworth is from the series AIR: 24 Hours, a group of twenty-four large paintings that she completed between 1991 and 1992, each representing an hour in a day of her life as an artist and mother. Each work contains a clock recording the time depicted, light grey for day, dark grey for night. The scene here is the artist’s young daughter’s room at 8pm, bedtime.

Throughout the series, Bartlett includes some objects that are out-of-place, in order to provide clues to world events happening beyond the domestic setting. Here the fallen photograph of Mikhail Gorbachev is a reference to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. A timely reminder that history and the present are always intertwined.

Jennifer Bartlett (American, b.1941), Air: 24 Hours 8 P.M., 1991-1992, Oil on canvas, 84 x 84 inches, Gift of Alex and Ada Katz, 2005.4