Jo Baer

Jo Baer, born Josephine Gail Kleinberg on August 7, 1929, in Seattle, Washington, was one of the most distinctive and intellectually rigorous painters to emerge from the American Minimalist movement. She studied biology at the University of Washington before pursuing graduate psychology at the New School for Social Research in New York — an unusual academic formation that informed the analytical precision she would bring to painting. Baer died on January 21, 2025, in Amsterdam, where she had lived for many years.

From around 1960, Baer developed a hard-edge Minimalist practice that placed her at the forefront of a generation rethinking the fundamental conditions of painting. Her Korean series, produced in the early 1960s, established her foundational approach: reductive geometry, hard edges, restricted color, and a sustained attention to the painting's physical relationship with the wall. These concerns deepened across the Double Bar and Radiator series of the 1960s and 1970s, in which paired linear structures and emphatic borders investigated internal framing, symmetry, and the tension between painted surface and surrounding space. The Single Paintings of the same decades extended this inquiry, treating each canvas as an autonomous object organized around a tightly controlled, edge-based visual logic. After relocating to Europe in 1975, Baer underwent a significant transformation, gradually developing a figurative visual language that set her later work apart from her Minimalist origins — a shift that drew sustained critical attention and complicated, productively, her place in art history.

Baer's exhibition record spans major institutions across North America and Europe. Solo presentations include Jo Baer. Gemälde und Zeichnungen seit 1960 at Museum Ludwig in Cologne, In the Land of the Giants (Maps, Time-lines and Genealogies) at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and Jo Baer: In the Land of the Giants at Galerie Barbara Thumm in Berlin — all in 2013 — as well as Jo Baer. Towards the Land of the Giants at Camden Arts Centre in London in 2015, Jo Baer: The Risen / Originals at Pace Gallery in New York in 2020, and a solo presentation at Dia: Beacon in 2022. Her work entered prominent group contexts including two exhibitions at MoMA in 2017 — Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction and From the Collection: 1960–1969 — as well as the Whitney Biennial 2017, America is Hard to See at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2015, and the 31st Bienal de São Paulo in 2014. She received the Jeanne Oosting Foundation Prize for Painting in 2016. Works by Baer are held in the collections of MoMA, the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, and corporate collections including Chase Manhattan Bank and DaimlerChrysler AG. Pace Gallery, New York, has represented her since 2019, and a solo exhibition at Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin, is scheduled for 2025.