Jay DeFeo

Jay DeFeo began taking photographs in depth in 1970, shortly after the completion of her monumental 2000-pound marriage of painting and sculpture, The Rose (1958–1966), and her move from San Francisco to the relative seclusion of Marin County, California. Over the next five years, DeFeo engaged in a restless exploration of herself and her surroundings through the camera, producing an extraordinary wealth of deeply poetic images. With over seventy unique photographs, photocollages and photocopies, the exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery is the largest ever presentation of DeFeo’s photographic works, and the first exhibition devoted to DeFeo’s experiments across photographic media. Together with the new monograph Jay DeFeo: Photographic Work (DelMonico, 2023), with essays by Hilton Als, Judith Delfiner, Corey Keller, Justine Kurland, Dana Miller and Catherine Wagner, the exhibition sets the stage for serious consideration of DeFeo’s innovations in the medium of photography.

DeFeo was teaching painting at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1970s, and the photography students in her classes became her first guides to darkroom printing. The influence of the “straight photography” style of the SFAI’s photography department, founded by Ansel Adams in 1945, can be discerned in DeFeo’s exquisite studies of tangling branches and tropical leaves, delicate still lives and urban views. This classical influence, albeit untraditionally imparted, was complemented by a dialogue with unconventional artist peers such as Bruce Conner and Wallace Berman, as DeFeo expanded her photographic style into a thoroughly idiosyncratic practice. A series of chemigrams dedicated to Salvador Dalí embody DeFeo’s surrealist impulses, while wild combinations of torn and cut-out prints blossom into dreamlike photocollages.

DeFeo’s photography is thoroughly intertwined with her work as a painter. The artist often used her camera to document works in progress, and her photographs would in turn provide the source material for new paintings, in a continual flow between painting and photograph as subject and object. When DeFeo turned to document her surroundings, her sensitive and inventive compositions filled with complex textures and sharp contrasts betray a painter’s eye, along with DeFeo’s specific propensity for a “colorful monochromatic” palette. The majority of DeFeo’s photographs were made in her studio, where improbable objects were exalted and transformed into rich tonal landscapes through a remarkable economy of means. Two series of photocopy works, made by placing a drawing compass and a cherished cup directly onto the glass plate at various angles, underline DeFeo’s anti-hierarchical, unorthodox and egalitarian approach to the art object.

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 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. One-person exhibitions of DeFeo’s work have taken place at the 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, which traveled to the Aspen Art Museum. DeFeo’s works are in the collections of many major museums, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Art Institute of Chicago; The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Tate Modern, London, and The Centre Pompidou, Paris.