Jo Baer

Jo Baer, ​​as Josephine Gail Kleinberg ( born August 7, 1929 in Seattle, Washington, USA) lives and works since 1994 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. She is an American painter and graphic artist. It is considered a major representative of minimalism in art.

Life and work

Jo Baer studied from 1946 to 1949 Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle. She took evening classes in painting and drawing. In 1950, she worked on a kibbutz in Israel and moved to New York City.

Jo Baer's early work is still characterized by an admiration of the Abstract Expressionists, especially the artist Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko. Later, she turned to the hard-edge painting. She won her own artistic expression in minimalism. It is regarded as one of the pioneers of minimalism in art.

In the late 1950s, her works from her " edgy " style are characterized as a follow up to her early work hard edge. Your minimalist paintings often consist of series of large and small squares or vertical and horizontal rectangles. It lays a special emphasis on the contours and the boundary lines of the image. Since the mid-1960s they also created numerous horizontally or vertically arranged diptychs and triptychs.

In 1968 works were shown of her on the documenta 4 in Kassel in the painting department. In 1975, at the height of her career, there was a major retrospective at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art After this exhibition, she turned away from the pressure of the New York art market and devoted himself to her structural images. They first moved to Ireland, then to London and finally to Amsterdam.

2013, the Museum Ludwig was the first German institution Jo Baer, a solo exhibition. Largely unknown drawings are complemented by important works on canvas, around 170 works and thus the most extensive retrospective Baers.

Works in collections

Her works are (among others) part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Seattle Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt, the Kröller- Müller Museum, Otterlo and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Literature and sources

• Exhibition catalog for Documenta IV: IV documentation. International Exhibition; Catalogue: Volume 1: ( painting and sculpture ); Volume 2: (graphics / objects ); Kassel 1968
• Harald Kimpel and Karin Stengel: documenta IV International Exhibition 1968 - A photographic reconstruction ( Series of the documenta - Archives); Bremen 2007, ISBN 978-3-86108-524-9
• Julia Friedrich: Jo Baer - drawings and paintings since 1960, bookstore Walter König, Cologne 2013 ( with a preface by Philipp Kaiser and contributions by Julia Friedrich, Jutta Koether, Lucy Lippard, Lauren O'Neill - Butler and David Raskin ( in German and English) )