Jill Baroff: Survey

Jill Baroff: Survey was a solo exhibition at Bartha Contemporary, 7 Ledbury Mews North, Notting Hill, London, from 26 January to 26 February 2022. It gave an overview of 25 years of the American artist's practice, with works from the 1990s to 2020. Among them were Set of Five small Midnight Drawings (2012) and Current (Hudson River) 3 (2017), both in pigmented ink on Japanese gampi mounted on rag.

Baroff was born in Summit, New Jersey, in 1954 and lives and works in New York. Her Tide Drawings start from records of water levels at particular places and times, which she turns into grids, concentric circles and linear sequences drawn by hand on gampi. They follow the ebb and flow of the tides and also register hurricanes, storm surges and other unusual weather. The tide and Hudson River drawings reflect her upbringing near New York Harbour and her long engagement with the city's waterways, and her use of gampi points to her time in Kyoto. In other works she paints borders on paper, cuts them away and returns the sheet to water, so that the forms fold and rearrange themselves. More recently she has made wood reliefs and wall works.