Jo Baer, a groundbreaking artist who pushed the boundaries of painting throughout her six-decade career, died on January 21st at the age of 95. Her death was announced by her representing gallery, Pace.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Baer was a crucial voice in New York’s Minimalist art scene. Her groundbreaking hard-edge paintings were included in many landmark exhibitions of the time. In particular, her work was included in “Systemic Painting” at the Guggenheim Museum in 1966, a significant survey of painters in the burgeoning Geometric Abstraction movement.
“Jo Baer was a visionary painter who made a name for herself in the male-dominated New York art world of the 1960s,” wrote Samantha Rubell, president of Pace Gallery, in a press statement. “As one of the truly great practitioners of Minimal Abstraction, she shook the very definition of painting with her revolutionary canvases.”
Born in Seattle in 1929, Baer originally studied biology at the University of Washington where she took introductory drawing and painting classes. Later, she earned a graduate degree in psychology from the New School for Social Research in New York. Throughout the 1960s, her paintings were exhibited alongside works by her (mostly male) peers, including Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Sol LeWitt.
Following her 1975 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Baer relocated to Europe, where she lived in England and Ireland before settling in Amsterdam in 1984. There, she abandoned the Minimalism that had defined her career and explored new approaches to painting. Over time she added symbolism and figuration, along with text elements to her work. Baer joined Pace Gallery’s program in 2019 and presented her first solo show with the gallery in 2020.
Baer has mounted solo exhibitions at the Dia Art Foundation in New York, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, and Camden Arts Centre in London. Most recently, in 2023, she presented “Coming Home Late: Jo Baer In the Land of the Giants” at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.
Her work is currently on view in the group show “Vital Signs: Artists and the Body” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, running through February 22nd.
