Primary Light Group: Red, Green, Blue
These three paintings belong to a series of twelve that vary in color, luminosity, size, and shape. A product of the 1960s impulse to create art from predetermined systems, the works in this series can be arranged in 831,753,600 combinations, Baer has calculated. These three large square paintings are bordered with intense “Mach bands,” rendering, according to the artist, “primary colors of light: a red (magenta), a green, and a blue.” Baer, who was trained in physiological psychology and is interested in optical phenomena, has said that the paintings in this triptych—installed, according to her specifications, “one foot or a little less apart”—were “constructed equivalent to one another as a color presence.”
