Jay DeFeo American, March 31, 1929-November 11, 1989

It's easy to make the mistake of thinking that Jay DeFeo’s artworks are abstract. They are not. Each was modeled on an object, either from her daily life (a shoe tree, her swim goggles, a Kleenex box) or inspired by the tools or by-products of art making (a draftsman’s compass, the tripod for a camera, her mangled eraser, a photographic image).

Over and over again, she’d draw, photograph and paint some unremarkable thing. She’d obliterate, scratch at, cut up and cannibalize her representations, with each iteration moving further from convention. It was a playful investigation of formal motifs, as well as revelry in the sensuality of paper and canvas and the myriad ways they can be marked, stained and textured. It was a process she used to transcend the quotidian in search of something visionary.

In 2012/13, the work of Jay DeFeo (1929 – 1989) was the subject of a retrospective exhibition organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art that was 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, The Art Institute of Chicago, the British Museum, Centre Pompidou, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Menil Collection and many others.