Jennifer Bartlett's Enameled Steel Plates, 2012
Text by Marie-Claire Groeninck and Sabrina Locks
104 pages, Softcover with dust jacket
Published by Locks Art Publications
ISBN: 978-1-879173-81-1
Jennifer Bartlett became known for her bright enamel colors on one-foot-square screenprint-gridded steel plates, a medium that she created for her early minimal investigations of the late 1960s, and kept on expanding throughout her career. This publication collects installation shots from her large scale plate room installations along with smaller plate pieces. The Address steel plate works from 1976-78 are united for the first time, and were the focus of the accompanying exhibition at Locks Gallery. In the series, she enriches the archetypal image of the house with emotions; she depicts her own memories and the personalities of the people who lived at each address for whom the piece is named after. The square-and-triangle houses vary accordingly in scale, color, and technique. She exploits a freedom in the way she paints against the rules of the gridded plate, exploring different styles from dots to freehand, grids to hatches, colored lines, palette knife, etc.
