Jennifer Bartlett: Epic Systems

Over the course of her 40-year career, Jennifer Bartlett (born 1941) has tirelessly explored painting’s expressive possibilities through a series of rigorous conceptual systems. Jennifer Bartlett: Epic Systems presents her three most ambitious, large-scale works in one volume: Rhapsody, Song and Recitative. All three are composed of hundreds of individual paintings Bartlett made on square steel plates coated in baked enamel and overlaid with a grid pattern. Rhapsody, Bartlett’s career-defining work, was first shown in 1976; Bartlett’s most recent large-scale work, Recitative (2011), finds the artist still productively working through the possibilities offered by the grid, this time to create an epic exploration of color that references Minimalism and the rule-based systems of Conceptual art. Epic Systems is the first publication to bring together these three critical works from the career of one of the most significant painters of the last half-century.