JENNIFER BARTLETT: AMAGANSETT
April 18 – June 7, 2008

Richard Gray Gallery is pleased to announce Jennifer Bartlett: Amagansett, an exhibition of the artist's newest work. In this series of richly-layered oil paintings, Bartlett unleashes a heightened painterly technique. The canvases are remarkably lush and – while Bartlett has reinterpreted her characteristic grid approach – the works retain the same rationalism that has formed the underpinning of the artist's style throughout her career.

Working from her own photographs, Bartlett depicts the vast ocean shores, expansive skies, and thickets of marsh grass that populate the area near her home on the tip of Long Island. Painted over the course of the last year, the nine diptych paintings vary in dimension from 36 x 72 inches to 108 x 216 inches, each twice as wide as it is tall. The artist's iconic houses reappear in two works: pairs of stoic, juxtaposed cottages in "Amagansett #3 (Two Houses)" and "Amagansett #4 (Two Houses with Fence)". The paintings are sensual and quiet, and as catalogue author Vincent Katz observes, "[they make] no concession to narrative."

Jennifer Bartlett was born in 1941 in Long Beach, California. She received her MFA from Yale in 1965, and since that time her work has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Her work is included the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among many others. Bartlett lives and works in New York City.

Jennifer Bartlett: Amagansett will be on view at Richard Gray Gallery-Chicago, 875 North Michigan Avenue, Suite 2503 (John Hancock Center) from April 18 – June 7, 2008. The exhibition will coincide with Art Chicago, held at the Chicago Merchandise Mart. A full-color catalogue with an essay by Vincent Katz will be available.