Jo Baer: Towards The Land Of The Giants

Amsterdam based, American artist Jo Baer (b.1929) emerged as one of the key figures in the Minimalist art movement during the 1960s and 70s. She is best known for paintings characterised by precise composition of line and space and her use of the peripheries of the canvases. In 1983, she dramatically announced ‘I am no longer an abstract artist’, turning towards figuration and symbolic imagery. Her first major show in a UK public gallery will centre around her most recent series of paintings, In the Land of the Giants.

The new series, developed since 2009, reflects on her life-long interest in history and science. Inspired by Palaeolithic cave paintings, Baer saw in these ancient marks, with their instilled meaning, a midway between abstraction and figuration. Depicting esoteric and evocative imagery from her years living in the remote countryside of County Louth, Ireland, springs, stone alignments and phases of the moon are montaged against a backdrop of vast rolling green landscapes. The works trace her fascination in Neolithic innovation, eschatology and the sublime, whilst mapping convergences between humans and nature, and timelines of thought and memory.

This exhibition will draw a lineage from her earlier minimalist works, through her experiments with the figurative in the 1990s, through to her current emboldened aesthetic.