The Elements: Earth

American painter and printmaker Jennifer Bartlett is internationally recognized for her evocative, often oversized, grid pictures. She first came to prominence in the late 1970s as a leading member of the New Imagists, an informal group of figurative artists who reacted against the prevailing influence of installation and performance art, often producing works with a distinctive neo-expressionist style. In her early work, Bartlett appropriated and adapted ideas and imagery from a range of 20th-century art movements, including minimalism, conceptualism, and process art, transforming the visual and conceptual philosophies of these movements into something distinctly personal. She was fascinated with the concepts of classifying and cataloguing objects and ideas, and incorporated patterning systems of plaids, dots, gestures, and grids within her compositions, something that has become her trademark style. These same ideas and imagery also informed Bartlett's graphic work and print editions. She is a prolific printmaker, having produced more than 150 editions during her career.