page_title: Jo Baer
section_title: Paintings and exhibitions
hierarchical_section_title: Jo Baer / Life and career, 1960-1975 / Paintings and exhibitions
context_page_description: Josephine Gail Baer is an American painter associated with minimalist art. She began exhibiting her work at the Fischbach Gallery, New York, and other venues for contemporary art in the mid-1960s. In the mid-1970s, she turned away from non-objective painting. Since then, Baer has fused images, symbols, words, and phrases in a non-narrative manner, a mode of expression she once termed "radical figuration." She currently lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
context_section_description: In 1960 Baer rejected Abstract Expressionism for spare, hard-edge non-objective painting. Two early important paintings in this style were Untitled (Black Star) (1960-1961; Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo) and Untitled (White Star) (1960-1961; Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo). She then introduced an even more pared-down format:  the image was excised and the central area of the canvas became completely white.   In 1962 Baer began the Korean series, a group of sixteen canvases.  The Koreans were given their name by the art dealer Richard Bellamy, who said that Baer's paintings were just as unknown as Korean art was to most Westerners. The Koreans were composed of a dominant field of densely painted white enclosed by bands of sky blue and black that seem to shimmer and move:  this optical illusion underscored Baer's focus on "the notion of light." Baer ascribed her inspiration for the Koreans to Samuel Beckett's novel The Unnamable, which she was reading at the time. His observations about osmosis and diffusion through membranes influenced her to examine the properties of boundaries between spaces. In many works that Baer created between 1964 and 1966, the peripheries and edges of the canvas continued to be marked by two square or rectangular bands of color.  The outer, thicker border was black; inside it, a thinner band was painted in another color, such as red, green, lavender, or blue. Baer summed up the artistic concerns of her own work in 1971, writing, "Non-objective painting's language is rooted, nowadays, in edges and boundaries, contours and gradients, brightness, darkness and color reflections. Its syntax is motion and change."
  Baer was accepted as a peer in the burgeoning Minimalist movement by such artists as Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, and Dan Flavin. In 1964 Flavin organized "Eleven Artists," an exhibition that was an important step in defining the key figures of Minimalism. He included Baer, along with Judd, Flavin, LeWitt, Ward Jackson, Frank Stella, Irwin Fleminger, Larry Poons, Walter Darby Bannard, Robert Ryman, Leo Valledor, and himself. In 1966 Baer's first one-person show took place at the Fischbach Gallery, then a center for avant-garde art. That year she was also represented in both "Systemic Painting," a survey exhibition of contemporary geometric abstraction at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. She also participated in "10," a group exhibition at the Virginia Dwan Gallery co-curated by Ad Reinhardt and Robert Smithson that further enshrined its participants as canonical for Minimalism.  Besides Baer, Reinhardt, and Smithson, the other artists selected were Carl Andre, Judd, LeWitt, Flavin, Robert Morris, Michael Steiner, and Agnes Martin. Baer's works shown in these exhibitions, which included vertical and horizontal single, diptych, and triptych paintings, established her avant-garde reputation in the New York art world.
  In the late 1960s, Baer was experimenting with color and shifting the visual focus of her work. While working on the series The Stations of the Spectrum (1967-1969), Baer painted over their white surfaces to make them gray. She then turned them into triptychs because she saw that these paintings had more wall power when they were hung together. Next, as she said, "I wanted to know what happens around a corner – that interested me as an optical thing." The result was the Wraparound paintings, where-in which Baer painted thick black bands edged by blues, greens, oranges, and lavenders that went around the sides of the canvas – areas that artists customarily ignore, overlook, or cover with a frame. More than ever, the action was at the edges: "Sensation," Baer wrote, "is the edge of things.  Where there are no edges, there are no places—a uniform visual field quickly disappears."  Further challenging the notion of where a painting begins or ends, Baer added sweeping diagonal and curved paths of color that streaked across her once-inviolate white fields and down the sides of the canvas.  These canvases bore titles like H. Arcuata (1971; coll. Daimler Corporation, Zurich) and V
caption: The Old Year (1974-1975)
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