Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery is pleased to present Jay DeFeo: Photographs/Works on Paper, running from January 15th through February 27th, 2010. An opening reception will be held on Friday, January 15th from 6-8 pm.
This exhibition brings together a select group of works from the 1950s through the 1980s as a special project in partnership with the Jay DeFeo Trust.
The works on view reveal DeFeo’s rejection of the “hierarchy of media,” effacing boundaries between photography, drawing, painting, and sculpture and between abstraction and representation. Brigid Doherty has written, “although she manipulates two-dimensionality with a keen eye for optical play, the central image pushes the pictorial space beyond the literal surface of the paper.” In these works, opposites interpenetrate: dark is contained within light, and vice versa; the smooth appears rough— haptic qualities are translated into visual effects. DeFeo’s experiments with photography and numerous material processes reflexively connect the act of formal composition to her studio practice, embedding one within the other. An abstract ink wash drawing from the 1950s is echoed in an undulating photograph of silver mylar from the 1970s, while a photograph of shattered glassware shares the interest in transparence, openings, and overlay found in her graphite and acrylic drawings from the 1980s.
Jay DeFeo (1929-1989) was a major figure in the San Francisco Bay Area art world. Her work is included in the collections of the the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others. In the 1950s she exhibited at the Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco and the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. Exhibitions of her work include Sixteen Americans, Museum of Modern Art (1959); WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007, traveled to multiple venues); Traces of the Sacred in Twentieth Century Art, Centre Pompidou / Haus der Kunst, Munich (2008); elles@centrepompidou, Centre Pompidou (2009). In 2012 there will be a retrospective of her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Above: Summer Landscape No. 20: The Separation 1982, 2009 © The Jay DeFeo Trust/Artists Rights Society/ARS, New York
Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery
526 W. 26th Street, No. 213
New York, NY 10001
gallery@nicoleklagsbrun.com
P. 212.243.3335
F. 212.243.1059
nicoleklagsbrun.com
