Spaightwood Galleries is pleased to announce the recent acquisition of Jennifer Bartlett’s Earth Fireworks, a brilliant 26-color silkscreen printed on paper measuring 28" x 36",published in both a pencil-signed and numbered edition of 108 impressions and as a 26-color screenprint with poster text on slightly larger paper (the text is printed below the image and can be matted so that only the image is visible; in the great tradition of the affiche, this is not a photo-mechanical reproduction but an original print) in an edition of about 500 impressions. The work measures 32"x40" inches matted in a metal one. Earth Fireworks may be viewed on Saturdays and Sundays from noon to 6:00 p.m. and by appointment.

Jennifer Bartlett (American, b. 1941), one of the most important members of the New Image group, came to prominence during the 1970s.. Her early work played 20th-century art movements thematatically, counterpointing theme and variation through large series of images. As Holland Cotter suggested in a May 1986 feature story in Art and America, "The 1976 watershed piece Rhapsody . . . summed up where Bartlett had been and where she was going, effectively laying out for inspection her accumulated formal data and possible stylistic strategies. The large work, 7.5' x 153.75' and composed of nearly a thousand gridded steel plates, began stylistically with her familiar Conceptual 'look,' then moved through episodes suggesting decorative and pattern art to something like Photo-Realism before concluding in a kind of Impressionistic dissolve. In short, Bartlett not only scoured early 20th-century art for sources but added nearly every '60s and '70s movement short of performance art, to the Minimalism, Conceptualism, and process art with which she was already working, and from all this extracted a hybrid species of painterly abstraction to pursue" (126). In short, in its self-consciousness about where it was coming from and its elaboration of all the places to which it might be going, Bartlett displayed a distinctly Post-Modern sensibility combined with dazzling technical facility.

Earth Fireworks, commissioned by New York’s Lincoln Center, presents a neo-expressionist scene in which a night sky is lit by fireworks, allowing us to seehuman actors around the bottom and left margins, some playing with fireworks, others simply enjoying the spectacle. We urge you not to miss this opportunity to acquire one of Bartlett’s most beautiful and accessible works.

Bibliography: Jennifer Bartlett, In the Garden, with an introduction by John Russell (NY: Abrams, 1982); Jennifer Bartlett, Rhapsody, with an introduction by Roberta Smith (NY: Abrams, 1985); Holland Cotter, "The Bartlett Variations," Art and America 74: 5 (1986), 124-131 (the essay coincided with a retrospective exhibition that traveled from the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), to the Brooklyn Museum, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City), the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, and ended at the Carnegie Institute Museum of Art (Pittsburgh); Deborah Eisenberg, Air: 24 Hours. Jennifer Bartlett (NY: Abrams, 1994); Marge Goldwater, Roberta Smith, and Calvin Tompkins, Jennifer Bartlett (NY: Abbeville Press, 1985, revised 1989); Jeff Petrone, Jennifer Bartlett: Recent Work (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1988).

Chamber Music Society (Charles A. RIley II, Art at Lincoln Center [NY: Lincoln Center, 2009], p. 151). Original color silkscreen, 1981. Edition: 144 signed and numbered impressions plus 18 artist's proofs. In this work, Bartlett plays with an object and its variations, depending upon light, time of day, perspective, viewer, etc. The juxtaposition invites us to consider whether the more "literal" representation is any less abstract than the frankly abstract representation in garish "unnatural" colors beneath it is any less a view from nature than the more "normal" one at the top of the sheet. Image size: 830x545mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.

Earth (Orlando 23). Original color aquatint and soft-ground etching, 1982. Edition: 80 signed and numbered impressions on on BFK Rives paper, of which ours is n. 77/80. Number 4 of 4 in the "Elements" Series (the other three are Air, Fire, and Water). Published by Creative Works Editions (Japan) . The work plays off against the trditional use of the skull as a memento mori and the reminder that when God made man he began with "red earth," the meaning of "Adam," and we are reminded, very unsomberly, that to earth we shall return. Image size: 788x791mm. Mat size: 40x40 inches. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.

Earth Fireworks (Charles A. RIley II, Art at Lincoln Center [NY: Lincoln Center, 2009], p. 181). Original 26-color silkscreen, 1996. Edition: 105 signed and numbered impressions (of which ours is n. 3/105) plus 14 artist's proofs. Jennifer Bartlett is an internationally-renowned installation artist, painter, printmaker and sculptor who has been at the forefront of the contemporary art movement since the mid-70s. Image size: 575x775mm. Price: Please call or email for current pricing information.

Spaightwood Galleries, Inc.

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