Hosfelt Gallery participates in ART Cologne with a solo booth by the legendary San Francisco artist, Jay DeFeo (1929-1989). In thirty drawings, paintings on paper, and photographs from the 1970s and 1980s, our exhibition elucidates DeFeo’s penchant for creating intimately related works, focusing on the dialogue between individual pieces and using their similarities and differences to illuminate her methodology. Originating directly from the Jay DeFeo Foundation, many of these works have never before been exhibited.DeFeo often worked from a model, a mundane object that she explored repeatedly in a wide variety of media, moving between representation and abstraction as poetically and with as much facility as she would between oil paint, graphite, collage and experiments in the dark room. These serial works were meditations on formal concerns as well as playful experimentations with media. Discoveries made in one work led to the next, with her ultimate goal being to transcend the everyday and uncover the sublime.
Jay DeFeo was at the center of the Beat Movement in San Francisco in the 1950’s. She famously painted a 1,200 pound (545 kg) painting, The Rose, that took her 8 years to complete and which is in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s collection. The painting is a paragon of the energy and experimentation of the Beat Generation.
In 2012-2013, the work of Jay DeFeo was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and also presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. DeFeo’s works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Art Institute of Chicago, the British Museum, Centre Pompidou, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and many others.