Jo Baer, Painter of “Radical Figuration,” dies at 95

Over the course of more than 60 years, Baer pushed the formal and experiential possibilities of painting into radical new directions. In the 1960s and 1970s, her groundbreaking hard-edge paintings were included in many landmark exhibitions of work by New York minimalists, including Systemic Painting at the Guggenheim Museum and 10 at the Dwan Gallery, both in 1966. Shortly after her 1975 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the artist made a permanent move to Europe, where she would go on to explore new approaches to painting, gradually adding figural elements, text, images, and symbols to her work.

Samanthe Rubell, President of Pace Gallery, says: “Jo Baer was a visionary painter who made a name for herself in the male-dominated New York art world of the 1960s. As one of the truly great practitioners of Minimal Abstraction, she shook the very definition of painting with her revolutionary canvases. Working closely with Jo, I was always struck by her strength and fearlessness—and her ability to reinvent herself and her approach to painting over the course of her career. Jo's power will be deeply felt in Pace's program and community for many years to come.”

Born in Seattle in 1929, Baer studied biology at the University of Washington—where she also enrolled in introductory painting and drawing courses—and earned a graduate degree in psychology from the New School for Social Research in New York. She began her artistic career in Los Angeles in the early 1950s before returning to New York in 1960. There, she would become a key figure in the city’s burgeoning minimalist scene with her hard-edge paintings featuring bands of color around their edges. She also painted symbols and objects in some of her early works, often examining sexual and gender politics in these more figurative compositions.

Jo Baer, The Risen (Big-Belly), 1960-1961/2019, oil on canvas, 72-3/8" × 72-3/8" (183.8 cm × 183.8 cm) © Jo Baer

Over the course of the 1960s, her paintings were exhibited alongside works by her mostly male peers—including Kenneth Noland, Robert Mangold, Frank Stella, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, and Sol LeWitt—and she presented her first-ever solo show at Fischbach Gallery in New York in 1966. Following her mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1975, she relocated to Europe, first living in England and Ireland before settling in Amsterdam in 1984.

Baer’s search for renewal in the 1970s brought her to “radical figuration,” a term she coined in her now famous 1983 letter to Art in America, declaring that she was “no longer an abstract artist.” The term, which the artist later moved away from, describes a midway point between abstraction and figuration in which she could utilize partial, edited, or layered images—both found and created—to generate space for a new language within painting.

During her years in England and Ireland, Baer departed from pure abstraction in her work, developing a new aesthetic grounded in images, text, and prehistoric signs that combined the new, the old, and the mythical. Over the nine years she spent living in Smarmore Castle in County Louth in Ireland, Baer became fascinated by the region’s Neolithic history, opening her practice up to ancient histories of civilization. Seeing painting as a continually evolving tradition that could not be easily broken down into neat stylistic or periodic categories, Baer found as much inspiration in archaeology, anthropology, astronomy, and geography as in contemporary culture.

“I wanted more subject matter and more meaning,” the artist once said of her decision to move away from Minimalism. “There was an awful lot going on in the world, and I didn’t just want to sit there and draw straight lines.”

Throughout her career, Baer mounted solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum and the Dia Center for the Arts in New York, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterloo, Netherlands, and the Camden Arts Centre in London. Most recently, in 2023, she presented Coming Home Late: Jo Baer In the Land of the Giants at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, which will display its recently acquired work by Baer in a new collections exhibition titled IMMA Collection: Art and Agency. Also in 2023, the artist also presented a solo exhibition at Highlanes Gallery in Drogheda, Ireland, located near the Boyne Valley megaliths that so inspired her.

She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions in recent years, including the 2012 Busan Biennale in Korea, the 2014 São Paulo Biennial, the 2016 Whitney Biennial in New York, and Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2017. Her work is currently on view in the group show Vital Signs: Artists and the Body at the Museum of Modern Art, running through February 22.

Today, Baer’s work can be found in major public collections around the world, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Tate in London; the Centre Pompidou in Paris; the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; the Museum Ludwig in Cologne; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark; the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra; and many other institutions.

Main Image: Jo Baer, 2020 © Yaël Temminck