Jennifer Bartlett (b. 1941, Long Beach, CA) is a pioneering artist who introduced three-dimensional elements into her practice in 1984, fundamentally reshaping her work throughout the decade. Her process characteristically begins with painting, from which sculptural counterparts emerge as direct replications of pictorial imagery. Bartlett's practice draws extensively on recurring motifs—houses, boats, and coastal imagery—that function as universal and deeply personal symbols exploring the concept of home. Her fascination with the ocean's contradictions—its endlessness and immediacy, transparency and darkness, arrival and departure—permeates her cinematic, sprawling compositions. Though based in New York City for most of her life, Bartlett's work is inflected by her birthplace in Long Beach, where the construction of the breakwater seawall in 1941 forever altered residents' relationship to their environment.
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