Whitney Biennial 2017

Floor 6

Born 1929 in Seattle, WA
Lives in Amsterdam, Netherlands

In her more than sixty years as a painter, Jo Baer has engaged with many different styles and movements without declaring allegiance to any of them. Her series In the Land of the Giants, begun in 2009, developed from her research into the Hurlstone, a prehistoric megalith in County Louth, Ireland. Baer sourced some of her imagery—which includes giants, human figures, animals, classical statuary, and landscapes—on the internet and then developed the works’ palette and compositions with digital software and colored pencil. By combining remnants of ancient cultures with fragments of the contemporary world, Baer unites her subjects within her own sense of “deep time” in which fantasy and reality blur while the past and present intermingle.