Locks Gallery will present two concurrent exhibitions of work by Jennifer Bartlett. Islands will include watercolors and pastels made from 1997 to the present of several tropical islands visited by Bartlett. Initially, these works on paper have the breezy feel of a snapshot made on vacation, but they continue several themes that she has worked with for some time. Bartlett has always been fascinated by using landscape as a conceptual sign (as in the simplified house forms in her last show at the Locks Gallery) and as a depiction of a specific place, as seen here. Also these works on paper continue Bartlett’s use of an extended series to examine a seemingly narrow subject. Here she portrays the ocean, beach, rocks, and palm trees with a great variety of markings and moods.
Oceans, a loan exhibition, presents major works by Bartlett from the 1970s and 1980s, including Atlantic Ocean and Pacific Ocean. These two monumental paintings from 1983 were commissioned by AT&T for their New York headquarters. Each painting measures nine feet high and thirty feet long. This will be the first time these works are shown in public. The exhibition will also include Night, 1983, a fifteen-foot painting from Bartlett’s landmark In the Garden series, as well as other large-scale works.
This is Bartlett’s third solo exhibition at the Locks Gallery. She has had many solo exhibitions internationally, including a retrospective organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in 1985, and a print retrospective organized by the Orlando Art Museum in 1999. The sixth book on Bartlett’s work, a monograph on her House series, will be published in the coming year. Her work is included in important museum collections internationally, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
