Works on paper
Jo Baer, James Bishop, Suzan Frecon
at Lawrence Markey September 9 – October 16, 2009
Opening Reception: Wednesday September 9, 5–7 pm
Lawrence Markey is pleased to announce an exhibition of works on paper by Jo Baer, James Bishop and Suzan Frecon.
Jo Baer was born in Seattle, Washington in 1929. She studied biology at the University of Washington and completed graduate work at the New School for Social Research in New York in 1953. Baer gained notoriety for her paintings, shown in seminal exhibitions of Minimalist art, in New York in the early 1960’s. Baer immigrated to Ireland after a mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975. She has lived and worked in Amsterdam since 1983. In a 1987 interview (with Barbara Flynn), Jo Baer described her work in painting saying, “All of the so- called abstract artists always have a tissue of meaning. I always did certainly.... I meant layers. I meant boundaries. I meant very specific things always”. The drawings featured in this exhibition date from 1962.
James Bishop is an American born painter who has lived and worked in France since 1958. Although Bishop’s work was exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008, “James Bishop, Paintings on Paper 1959–2007”, his work has been exhibited relatively little in the U.S. In his 2008 article Painting by Other Means Joe Fyfe characterized Bishop’s work alongside the French Support/ Surface movement, noting, “This movement, the most radically generous of the many reductive abstractionist tendencies of the 1960’s, proposed a radical concentration on the material attributes of painting while allowing for allusive content” (Art in America, Oct. 2008). Bishop himself has remarked that he is “of the quieter branch” of Abstract Expressionism.
Suzan Frecon was born in Pennsylvania and studied art at Penn State University from 1959 to 1963. She attended the Université de Strasbourg in 1962, and the École Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris from 1963 to 1966. She has lived and worked in New York since the late 1970's. Responding to watercolors from the exhibition, “form, color, illumination: Suzan Frecon painting” at the Menil Collection in 2008, David Cohen wrote in regards to her work on paper, “.... her general preference, in keeping with her inclination toward suspension, is for a balance of acceptance and resistance. Consequently, the watercolors are visceral objects, buckling, rough at the edges” (Art in America, Sept. 2008). Suzan Frecon's most recent watercolors will be featured in this exhibition.