Jennifer Bartlett
American, 1941-2022
Jennifer Bartlett was an American artist whose work bridged abstraction, representation, and installation. Born in Long Beach, California, she earned her BA from Mills College and her MFA from Yale University, where she developed an interest in the formal practices of Minimalism and Conceptual art. In the late 1960s, she began using small enameled steel plates as the foundation for large grid-based installations that combined order with visual variation.
Her breakthrough work, Rhapsody, 1975–76 consisted of 987 hand-painted steel plates arranged in a wall-length grid. The work’s scale and structure became central to her approach, allowing her to explore the relationship between system and expression. Over the next decades, Bartlett’s art moved between painting, sculpture, and printmaking, often depicting everyday subjects, houses, gardens, and seascapes, through shifting methods of repetition and pattern.
Bartlett received major retrospectives beginning in 1985, and her work is held in leading museum collections across the United States and abroad. In her later years, she expanded into public commissions and continued to explore the boundaries between analytical precision and personal observation. Her practice remains a study in balance between intellect and instinct.
