Jennifer Bartlett: Hospital Paintings, 2015
Text by Raphael Rubinstein
54 pages, Softcover
Published by Locks Publications
ISBN: 978-1-879173-97-2
This catalog is published on the occasion of Jennifer Bartlett's exhibition of her most recent series, Hospital Paintings. Art critic and poet Raphael Rubinstein writes, "From the beginning of her career she has been a restless and relentless transgressor of boundaries, among them figuration/abstraction, image/text, painting/sculpture. In her latest body of work—paintings and pastels that depict views from the windows of a New York City hospital, as well as scenes of hospital corridors and doorways—Bartlett continues to problematize her medium, even as she revels in its materials and genres." Working from snapshots taken during an extended 2012 hospital stay along the East River in Manhattan, Bartlett produced a series of pastels and a subsequent series of oil paintings. The exhibition debuts these psychologically charged paintings—of interior and exterior perspectives of the hospital, each containing an interrupting band of color and the word HOSPITAL transposed atop the scene. Throughout her career, Bartlett's work has maintained a signature mix of diaristic observational study of the world around her, rule-based conceptual systems for the execution of paintings, and an exhaustive play with different media.
