The American artist Jo Baer has died at the age of ninety-five, Pace Gallery announced on Wednesday. ‘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’, Samanthe Rubell, president of Pace Gallery, said in a statement.
Born in 1929 in Seattle, Baer majored in biology at the University of Washington, where she also studied painting and drawing, before obtaining a graduate degree in psychology from the New School for Social Research in New York. Baer began her career as an abstract artist in Los Angeles from 1957 to 1960, before moving back to New York where her hard-edge paintings made her a key figure in the minimalist art scene. Her works were widely exhibited throughout the 1960s alongside those of her peers including Frank Stella, Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. After a mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1975, Baer moved to Ireland, England and then to the Netherlands, where she settled in Amsterdam in 1984.
In the second half of her career, Baer moved away from abstraction, turning instead to ‘radical figuration’, a term she coined in a letter to Art in America in 1983. Reflecting on the span of her work for ArtReview in 2013, Terry R. Myers wrote that ‘Baer has made productive use of the gaps in verbal and pictorial language all along, by way of her clear and ongoing interest in signs and symbols’.
