Bird on Cone 円錐上の鳥

This work combines an oil painting on canvas and a three-dimensional piece made of metals (steel and lead). Both of them depict the same thing― a cone and a bird perched on it. But they use different "languages", or "ways of telling" in presenting them, and different aspects of the same subject get to be emphasized. In the painting, the focus is on the symbolic meanings arising from the imagery; in the sculpture, it is on the spatial volume. Bartlett's art is characterized, as in this work, by the simultaneous employment of different artistic languages aimed at presenting various aspects of the subject at once. The appeal of storytelling in visual art, once eliminated by Minimal Art and Conceptual Art, was rediscovered by Bartlett and other artists who started to win recognition in the mid 1970s. This particular work presents the myth of fire and resurrection, and the bird is the phoenix that is believed to throw himself into fire every five hundred　years to be reborn. This subject matter can be considered a variation of the leitmotif of the cycles of time, to which the artist has returned again and again.