Jennifer Bartlett: In the Garden (1980-83)

During and after her travels to a villa in Nice, France in 1979–80, Jennifer Bartlett embarked on an ambitious freehand drawing project of nearly 200 unique perspectives, experimenting with countless modes of representation of the villa’s garden. After her well-celebrated gallery installations of the works on paper, Bartlett embarked on equally riveting paintings that experimented with serial perspectives of the same scene and psychologically charged re-imaginings of her surroundings. Writer Gregory Volk “The remarkable thing is how this exhaustive and systematic, yet extremely diverse anatomy of a banal backyard scene winds up so emotive and complicatedly human, suffused with longing and alienation, grace and agitation, loveliness and unease.” Bartlett’s In the Garden continues to reveal its true urgency through of the artist’s cinematic relationship to painting from photographs, the felt curiosity for pictorial representation, and dialogue with the many languages in painterly history. This publication celebrates the full breadth and legacy of this four-year project, characteristic of the changing relationship to images in the 1980s. It notably brings together the works in the Locks Gallery exhibition with pieces in museum collections, surveying the full range of drawings, prints, and major paintings.