Jennifer Bartlett

Jennifer Bartlett: Binary Combinations, 1971 (detail); enamel over silkscreen grid on baked enamel; 30 steel plates, each 12 x 12 in.; 64 x 88 in. overall; partial and promised gift of Penny Cooper and Rena Rosenwasser.

Jennifer Bartlett’s extraordinary Binary Combinations (1971) is a multi-panel grid of thirty one-foot squares of enameled steel, each painstakingly painted with a series of color dots. Bartlett systematically explores six colors, on the left half of the grid laying out color components that optically mix into the colors that she dots out on the right half of the grid, achieving a kind of pointillism as conceptual process. “What if a painting is like a conversation between the elements in the painting?” Bartlett asked in a 2005 interview with artist Elizabeth Murray. It was this kind of questioning that drove Binary Combinations.

In the late 1960s, after completing her M.F.A. at Yale University (her B.A. was from Mills College), Bartlett moved to Lower Manhattan, joining a vibrant community of young artists who were developing the tenets of Minimalism and systems-based practices. While her execution was far more intuitive and hands-on than that of Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl André, or others of their ilk, in plate pieces like Binary Combinations Bartlett began to evolve a distinctive process-oriented approach that garnered enormous national and international attention from the early 1970s onward.

Lucinda Barnes
Chief Curator and Director of Programs and Collections