White, hot & cool: Jo Baer's austere early canvases, currently on view in New York City at the Dia Center for the Arts, recall a time when abstraction was still a vehicle for passionate polemic

Art in America, May, 2003 by Carol Diehl

Such ripe imagery would seem to lend itself to infinite investigation, but, again driven by a polemic, Baer has chosen to spend the years since the '70s exploring figuration in work that has only rarely been shown in the U.S. Like it or not, she can't get away from the art world's fixation on her black-banded paintings, which surface every so often as emblems of a time when the nature of art was being scrutinized and its boundaries extended. We are now living in the future toward which they were pointing. In this chaotic time of war, eerily similar to the one in which they were created, these paeans to structure and symmetry are particularly relevant, as they continue to ask more questions than they answer.

"Jo Baer: The Minimalist Years, 1960-1975," curated by Lynne Cooke, is on view at the Dia Center for the Arts, New York, through June 15, 2003.

Author: Carol Diehl is an artist who writes frequently for this magazine.