Jo Baer

When museum directors, curators and journalists visit American artist Jo Baer in her third floor loft in Amsterdam, they don’t feel any sense of leaving again. Her loft, which also houses her studio, is chock-a-block with tools, which overflow from shelves. Paintings still in progress hang from the raw walls. A poster of her very first exhibition at New York’s Fischbach Gallery in 1966 is also on display, framed in black. Back then, Baer was most famous for her minimalist art – paintings that typically featured a white area framed by a black square and a thin colored line.

Today, her artworks are more complicated – so much so that Baer says it would take too long to explain them in detail. But she does describe them as an “abstract” representation of her time in Ireland. And those long-ago days remain fresh in her memory. The 82-year-old recalls a day in 1973 when she had lunch with Andy Warhol:  “We got up to nonsense talking about doing a movie together with ourselves as the actors both having this white hair,” she says. During our meeting, Baer talked about a mysterious nude painting of herself, her years living in an Irish castle, and her work process.

Read the full interview in the printed issue of Wertical.

Release: 2014.

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