Many of her pieces were executed on small, square, enamel-coated steel plates that are combined in grid formations to create very large works.

[1][2] She grew up in the suburbs of Long Beach, close enough to the ocean that she developed an affinity for water, which would reappear in her mature work.

[11] Most critics perceived Bartlett's work as inventive, energetic, wide-ranging, and ambitious,[1][9][12] and she was considered one of the two best painters of the postminimalism generation.

[14] Early on, Bartlett made a number of three-dimensional works that she subjected to extreme conditions such as freezing and smashing.

[7] She came up with what is now one of her signature materials: foot-square steel plates with a plain white baked enamel surface on which was silkscreened a quarter-inch grid.

[7][12] Rhapsody is a painting executed on 987 foot-square enamel-coated steel tiles arranged in a grid 7 plates tall by roughly 142 wide, extending across multiple walls.

The subject matter consists of variations on what Bartlett felt were the basic elements of art: four universal motifs (house, tree, ocean, mountain), geometric forms (line, circle, triangle, square), and color (25 shades).

[1] According to critic Roberta Smith, Rhapsody is an epic achievement that brought together elements of photorealism, geometric abstraction, and pattern painting while also prefiguring 1980s Neo-Expressionism.

Bartlett used a few major motifs — an old swimming pool, a statue of a urinating boy, a row of cypresses — to explore perspective, scale, and changing light conditions.

The piece consists of a large painting of houses and boats on a dark ground, in front of which are placed sculptural versions of those same objects.

[9] In 1987, the BBC invited Bartlett as one of six international artists, including David Hockney and Sidney Nolan, to work digitally on a Quantel Paintbox.

Some pieces are diptychs in which Bartlett explores the shifts visible in a landscape between two moments of time or seen from two slightly different angles of view.

In it, Bartlett alternates between a first- and third-person voice to address and recount the subjects of family, marriage, career, friends, and death.

[8] Peter Schjeldahl, Ron Padgett, and other members of the poetry community that gathered at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery encouraged Bartlett to join them in reading her precise inventory of personal events and habits aloud, and she found an audience receptive to her literary minimal art work there.

[3][5] After marrying medical student Ed Bartlett in 1964, she commuted between the Soho district of New York City and New Haven, where she taught at the University of Connecticut.