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Jo Baer (1929- )
Amphora Frieze
2004
Collaborator: Susan Goldman
Edition of 30, Printed at the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions at Rutgers
Jo Baer, who was born in Seattle, Washington in 1929, currently lives and works in Amsterdam. Baer was a key figure among the celebrated Minimalist painters in New York in the 1960s and 1970s. During that period, she executed her series of different-sized squares as well as vertical and horizontal rectangles in the hard-edge style, works she later expanded into multipartite arrangements as diptychs and triptychs. Her works are in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Gallery, London; and the Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main.
Thank you to Benjamin J. Dineen Ill and Dennis C. Hull for the generous donation of this work.
Charles Kessler
1993 – G & F
Alkyd on wood
Left: 1993-F Heart Afflutter
Right: 1993-G
Charles Kessler lives in Jersey City, New Jersey. This work was featured in a thirty-year retrospective of his work at West Village Gallery in Jersey City. He writes about art online at http://leftbankartblog.blogspot.com. Janet Kolpos in Art in America wrote about this body of work:
"Clearly, for him, paint is an easy sell -a wondrous substance of entrancing surface and glorious hue, no matter where it's found." She also wrote, "No matter how offhand the support materials or the organization of elements in these works, one was drawn close to them to examine the radiant colors and the elastic surfaces of the paint." The artist writes, "I think she nailed it -that's what these paintings are about: closely experiencing the color and texture of the paint. Whether the work succeeds or fails, however, depends on the relationship of the colors to each other, on whether the colors enliven or weaken each other."
Thank you to Charles Kessler for the generous donation of this work.
Charles Kessler
Open Book
1998
Acrylic on canvas on wood, hardware
Charles Kessler lives in Jersey City, New Jersey. This work was featured in a thirty-year retrospective of his work at West Village Gallery in Jersey City. He writes about art online at http://leftbankartblog.blogspot.com. He says of this work:
"This is by far the most difficult painting I've ever worked on (this IS one painting). It took me about six months to finish. Not only did each panel have to work with the adjacent panel, but the edges that can be seen when looking at any one panel had to work color-wise with the other edges. By cutting out the center shapes and inlaying them into a background, I was able to try out many, many different possibilities without permanently committing to anything until the end. And it also makes the panels even more physical, less illusionistic.
"The main difficulty, the reason for this crazy format in the first place, is that I wanted the visual experience to change in a dramatic way as the panels are turned. The idea is to look at two open panels, compare them, experience the color, shape, texture, etc., move to the next panel, and hopefully, there's a sort of surprise, or at least there's some contrast or change in your experience- one set of panels affecting the experience of the others."
Thank you to Charles Kessler for the generous donation of this work.
