约瑟芬·盖尔贝尔认领

Jo Baer was one of the few women able to make her way on the male-dominated New York art scene in the 1960s. Baer studied biology and perceptual psychology before doing an art course in Los Angeles from 1953-60. Baer defended the importance of pictures in the context of Minimal Art, though the Minimal artists campaigned vehemently against painting as a relevant art form. By asserting that a painting is an object, and developing an anti-illusionistic style, Jo Baer gave her pictures a powerful physical presence. H. Arcuata (the botanical name for a kind of orchid) is one of a group of pictures dating from around 1970 that were intended to be hung low and viewed from a number of angles. The works become accessible only when the individual areas and the way they develop over the sides of the picture are investigated. Jo Baer felt her pictures contributed to the discussion on "the sovereignty of the subject and associated questions about the nature of self-determination"(J.B.).

These three paintings belong to a series of twelve that vary in color, luminosity, size, and shape. A product of the 1960s impulse to create art from predetermined systems, the works in this series can be arranged in 831,753,600 combinations, Baer has calculated. These three large square paintings are bordered with intense “Mach bands,” rendering, according to the artist, “primary colors of light: a red (magenta), a green, and a blue.” Baer, who was trained in physiological psychology and is interested in optical phenomena, has said that the paintings in this triptych—installed, according to her specifications, “one foot or a little less apart”—were “constructed equivalent to one another as a color presence.”