Following on from her successful retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, in 1975, Jo Baer turned away from Minimalism and left New York for Ireland, where she resided in Smarmore Castle in County Louth until 1982.

The time spent in Ireland coincided with a gradual shift towards ‘a radical figuration’, also known as ‘image constellations’ that combine figural elements, text, images, and symbols. It also contributed to Baer’s long-standing interest in history and science, especially the fields of archaeology, anthropology, physics, agriculture, and astronomy.

It was from the castle demesne that Baer spied the Hurlstone that would spur her archaeological research for the next decades connecting Ireland to the Middle East. Following her time in Ireland, Baer read many books on the Neolithic period, finding resonances in early structures worldwide – laid out, for instance, according to the same constellations. She embarked on research trips. In her studies of Turkey, she found a stone nearly identical to her Hurlstone. This research culminated in a suite of paintings now known as The Giant series, completed between 2009-2013.

Dusk (Bands and Endpoints), 2012, observes ‘the period of time that the Irish so wonderfully call “between the lights”, alluding to ‘”Patrick’s sun” with a yellow-lit horizontal band charted across Ireland’. The painting features various sites of significance from the Hurlstone in County Louth to the carved, black stones in Scotland’s Orkney Islands. Half-way through the light-yellow band, Dusk pictures the first known map of the moon depicted on one of the stones orthostats supporting the passage roof in the great mound of Knowth’. The painting presents large empty space, merging the radical figuration with the minimalism of Baer’s early works.