Jo Baer

United States of America  born 1929

Jo Baer was born Josephine Gail Kleinberg on 7 August 1929 in Seattle, Washington. She studied at the University of Washington, Seattle, from 1946 to 1949, majoring in biology, but also taking art courses. In 1953 she married the television writer Richard Baer and moved to Los Angeles. By 1957 she was painting full-time, encouraged by the sculptor Ed Kienholz, co-owner of Ferus Gallery. In 1960 she moved to New York where she met Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd and began to paint in a reductive 'hard-edge' style. Baer held her first solo exhibition at Fischbach Gallery, New York, in 1966, and her first solo exhibition abroad at Galerie Rolf Ricke, Cologne, in 1969. In 1975 she was given a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In the same year she left New York to live in Ireland, at Smarmore Castle, Ardee. In 1977 the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, organised a retrospective, which travelled to Belfast, Dublin and Eindhoven. Since 1975 Baer has painted figuratively, exhibiting these works mainly at the Lisson Gallery, London. In 1983 she moved to Amsterdam, where she currently lives and works. The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam held a retrospective of her work, Jo Baer: Paintings 1960–1998, in 1999, and in 2002–2003 Dia: Chelsea, showed Jo Baer: The Minimalist Years, 1960–1975, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States since 1975.

See more works by this artist in the NGA collection

Jo Baer Untitled (vertical flanking diptych - red) 1966-74 Purchased 1973 Learn more