JAY DEFEO

The 1980s brought stability and some financial security to DeFeo’s life and career as she expanded her studio, became a tenured professor at Mills College, Oakland, and had regular gallery representation. DeFeo’s renewed energy is evident in the ambitious scale of the works (both large and small, the latter a new size for DeFeo paintings) and her embrace of new materials, colors and techniques. Correspondence and images in the artist’s archive reveal the exhaustive research that supported her process and decision-making, and the prior drawings, photographs and photocopy collages that provided originating source material for the painted forms. Resounding with the echoes of earlier works and cut short by her untimely death at age sixty in 1989, DeFeo’s paintings of the 1980s are in every sense a culmination of her career.

In each of the paintings in the main gallery, gestural abstractions centered around single, purposeful forms emerge from muted backgrounds. Some––Geisha II, 1984/1987, Untitled (Reclining Figure), 1986, and Bride, 1986––are modeled on still lives assembled by the artist, while others––Hawk Moon No. 1, 1983-85, The Assignment, 1983––are derived from DeFeo’s collages of printed materials. Although informed by identifiable sources, each work becomes transformed, in DeFeo’s words, “from objective reality toward an inner reality.”¹ In the front gallery, small, instinctively created canvases (none larger than 20 by 19 inches) achieve monumentality on an intimate scale. The majority are from DeFeo’s Alabama Hills series and inspired by the landscapes she encountered in central California. Rather than depicting any specific feature of a real landscape, the works are intended to evoke the feeling of climbing a mountain and the transformative potential of a metaphorical ascent.

There will be two public programs during the exhibition. On November 1, writer Jordan Stein and artist Trisha Donnelly, concurrently the subject of one-person exhibition at The Drawing Center, will lead a walkthrough of the exhibition. On December 11th, renowned harpist Zeena Parkins will be joined by percussionist William Winant for the East Coast premiere of her new composition Modesty of the Magic Thing, 2025. Inspired by DeFeo’s drawing series Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1989, this performance will present a rare opportunity to encounter Parkins’s music alongside DeFeo’s art.

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1.

Jay DeFeo, slide lecture at University of California, Santa Cruz, May 10, 1989. Video recording, Archive of The Jay DeFeo Foundation, Berkeley, CA

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Jay DeFeo (1929 –1989) experimented widely with a range of unorthodox materials, exploring the parameters of painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, photocopies, and photography. In 1959 her work was featured in Sixteen Americans at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. From 1958 to 1966 DeFeo worked almost exclusively on the iconic work, The Rose. First exhibited in 1969 at the Pasadena Art Museum, California, the work was subsequently installed at the San Francisco Art Institute, before being acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1995. In 2012 the Whitney organized Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective, which traveled to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The Rose is currently on view at the Whitney and DeFeo’s work is also featured in the museum’s main exhibition Sixties Surreal (Sept 24, 2025 – Jan 19, 2026). Additional one-person exhibitions of DeFeo’s work have taken place at University Art Museum, Berkeley, CA (1990), Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia (1996), and the San Jose Museum of Art, California (2019), among others. In 2018, Le Consortium in Dijon, France, organized Jay DeFeo: The Ripple Effect, a show examining her legacy and lasting influence on contemporary artists working today, and which traveled to Aspen Art Museum. DeFeo’s works are in the collections of many major museums, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Art Institute of Chicago; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Tate Modern, London, and Centre Pompidou, Paris.