In seven parts
Canvases 5-7 : 6 1/2 x 8 3/4 inches (16.5 x 22.2 cm)
16 3/4 x 28 inches overall (42.5 x 71.1 cm)
Jennifer Bartlett (b. 1941 Long Beach, CA, d. 2022 Amagansett, NY) was known for her room-sized installations ranging in medium, that explored the oft-mundane elements of her immediate environments including houses, mountains, trees, gardens, and the ocean. Her work moved from Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism to Conceptualism, with some pieces touching on all at once. Working in two dimensions and occasionally moving to three, Bartlett’s works often started in a controlled, mathematical grid and moved to more painterly realism.
Jennifer Bartlett’s Fire series (1989–1990) is a dramatic, large-scale collection of enamel-on-wood paintings and installations exploring themes of violence, destruction, and rejuvenation.
One of four bodies of work that Bartlett devoted to the natural elements - Earth, Air, Water, and Fire - the Fire paintings represent a facet of Bartlett’s practice that examines the anxiety of disaster, cataclysm, and, ultimately, transformation. Fire - as subject and as metaphor - marked an important shift in Bartlett’s practice, as she moved away from the precise and controlled minimalist impulses that characterized her early work and toward the looser, more painterly investigations of nature and home she embarked upon in the late 1980s. While Bartlett is hailed for her disciplined, systematic approach to artmaking (frequently executed at a dauntingly ambitious scale), the Fire series deals, necessarily, with matters that are inherently unknowable, taking as its motif a symbol of resurrection, renewal, and regeneration.
While only alluded to in other bodies of Bartlett’s work, themes of violence and transformation are at the heart of the Fire paintings - themes that become more prescient when viewed from a contemporary landscape of continually worsening wildfires across California, her home state, and so much of the world.
The first major museum survey exhibition of Bartlett’s work was organized in 1985, traveling from the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN to the Brooklyn Museum, NY and then the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg, PA. In 2006, her early enameled steel plate paintings were surveyed at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover MA. In 2013 and 2014, a second survey of Bartlett’s work - Jennifer Bartlett: History of the Universe, curated by Klaus Ottmann - traveled to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, PA and the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY.
Bartlett’s work is featured in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Tate Modern; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others.
