스킵네비게이션

PART I, UNTITLED (KOREAN)
These are early paintings done in 1962-63. Their basic format is simple: a six-foot white square echoed by black bands about four inches wide, placed several inches in from the outer edge of the canvas. A narrow blue border rims the inside edge of the black on all sides except the top. Variation in the paintings occurs at the top, where blue banding is used in simple patterns that create surprisingly strong differences in the feel of each canvas. The black band also fluctuates in width at the top. Although their stringency makes it hard to accept, these paintings were worked out intuitively. They are not an arbitrary series; the problems in each canvas were solved with six inch by six inch gesso working drawings before they were painted. No tape was used. They are immaculately but not mechanically done, and their edges still show the rigor required to produce them with a brush.Seeing these paintings is so different from the cool, rational experience of most so-called Minimal work, that it would deny their true visual quality to talk about them in the arid terminology commonly used for the work of artists who began painting pictures as things-in-themselves in the early 1960s.Given sufficient viewing time, Baer’s canvases begin to convey sensations ranging all the way from baroque or romantic to archaic and implacable. They are about light and mood rather than geometry. Some canvases appear to reflect light from their square white centers, while others absorb or radiate it. I wanted to view them as windows or archways, especially since they are hung low enough to walk through figuratively. But my eye was stopped from penetration by an intuition that space is only alluded to in those squares. They hover at the wall’s surface, filled by impervious light, rather than receding illusionistically. If they are windows at all, they must open on more luminous atmospheres than ours.
Text: Kasha Linville, Artforum (1971)

PART II, “ IMAGE WORKS“
To call a urinal a shrine would amount to blasphemy had it not been for that crucial Duchampian gesture back in 1917 – a gesture that artists have been compelled to revisit ever since, like a tongue to a loosening tooth.In contrast to her rather crass subject matter and title, Baer paints in thin, almost Rothkoesque layers, allowing her to keep line and plane (and their respective rhythms) in a pictorial balance. The entire painting is composed of clearly defined, differently-colored planes, although her palette clings to the colors we associate with a bathroom and the organic functions to which it is dedicated.In figurative, even illusionist terms, the dominant element of the painting is the urinal or “shrine”. In non-figurative terms, it could also pass for a frame within the frame of the painting as a whole, thus recalling Baer’s earlier work. The urinal’s armatures allude to a crucifix, while the entire thing is enclosed by a red wall and a floor covered in gray or brownish tiles. The right wall of the bathroom is kept a light brown color, while the wall to the left recedes into a brownish, rather indeterminate color field.A number of other planes give shape to the painting’s composition: a light space to the left that could be a stretch of pure canvas and, in the upper right-hand corner, a gray field scrawled with an abstract-seeming pattern of lines. Like a melody, these greenish or yellowish lines go over and thus structure the entire surface of the painting, though they also sketch out the contours of certain body parts: penis, testicles, and intestines. A watery line also draws in the toilet bowl and lid as though seen from above inside the urinal.This close description could easily go on for another page or two. But we’ll leave it at that. What should have become clear by now is Baer’s masterful use of figurative means in order to draw the viewer affectively closer to what is at issue in her painting – namely how color, shape and texture make themselves felt.