Untitled

Beginning in the early 1960s, Jo Baer created series—she called them “sets”—of abstract works based on tenets of perceptual psychology. On the surface, her work invoked the principles of Minimalism, which emphasized geometry, seriality, and the phenomenological encounter between viewer and object. Baer, however, pursued abstraction in search of spirituality, recalling earlier approaches by Piet Mondrian and Kasimir Malevich, and also in pursuit of “esthetic experience” as a “powerful effector of choice and action.” Believing artistic practice to be political, Baer rejected representation as nostalgic, conservative, and authoritarian.

In Baer’s “double bar” series, started in 1968, the black and brown bands that run along the edges of the painting are meant to provoke an optical effect known as Mach bands, which produce the illusion of darker edges or lines where two differing shades of gray meet one another. On this tiny panel, of which Baer made several in addition to much larger canvases, the Mach band effect makes the brown line, juxtaposed with black and gray, glitter like copper.