Jay Defeo

Nicole Klagsbrun is pleased to present an exhibition of works on paper from the 1950s by Jay DeFeo.

Jay DeFeo (1929-1989) was a major figure in the San Francisco Bay Area art world of the 1950s. Directly associated with the poets and artists of the Beat Area, her circle included poets Michael McClure and Philip Lamantia, and artists Wallace Berman and Bruce Conner. She was a leading artist of the Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco and of the genus Gallery, directed by Walter Hopps, Irving Blum and Ed Keinholz, in Los Angeles. In 1959, Dorothy Miller Included DeFeo’s work along with the work of Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Luoise Nevelson, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella in the exhibition “Sixteen Americans” presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

DeFeo’s work on paper is an important aspect of her art which also includes large scale canvases. The work presented here exemplify her treatment of imagery, form, texture and tonality while also showing her creative process and the full range of her explorations with materials - graphite, oil, pastel, tempered, watercolor, acrylic and collage. In these early years of her art practice, DeFeo struggled to come to grips with the heritage of Abstract Expressionism which led her to develop new approaches to image presentation and artistic process.

The richness of DeFeo’s drawings rests from her continued fascination with the interrelationships and contrasts: shapes, light and dark, hard edge and curved, reality and abstract, mythic and quotidian. These carefully depicted themes can be traced throughout her drawings and used to indicate the breadth and notable exploration that characterize the Boyd of her graphic work.

Jay DeFeo was active as na artist until her death: her work continued to be exhibited, primarily on the West Coast, throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

The exhibition will be on view from March 20 to April 17, 1993. For further information, please contact the gallery Tuesday through Saturday, from 10 to 6pm.

Assemblagist Show

NICOLE KLAGSBRUN is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, George Herms and Jess. The exhibit will run from March 1 - 30, 1991 and will include early works and more recent assemblage, collage, film and video.

The assemblages artists of California began making art in the 950’s that strongly influenced by Beat poetry and literature. Very much an underground phenomenon the work grew out of concern with and reaction to everyday experience and contemporary culture. The objects were and are still highly unusual at the same time that they are powerful and penetrating. Conceptually linked with Dada and Surrealism of the 1920’s, these objects remain outside any tradition or school of thought and are quintessentially American. Formally, the juxtaposition and association of disparate elements and materials make for art that is-lawful and full of energy. Yet messages implied and inherent in the work tend toward social criticism often with elusive mystical connotations as well. The works have a narrative quality” speaking about the former role of the individual elements and the process of transformation that they have undergone being discarded and recycled into another “life” and also saying something about the nature of relationships between objects, people and culture. To consider these artworks as personalities or as having character is not inappropriate, nor is it difficult to find meaning in them.

A significance of this work within a more traditional art historical role could be as a link with other trends and movements, from folk art to outsider to fluxes to Conceptual and more recently to “scatter-art”. Distinct from each, assemblage as a 3 dimensional collage nevertheless has clear association to all and thus becomes a cloud of exchange.

For further information please call the gallery at (212) 925 5157 between 10 and 6 Tuesday through Saturday and until 8 PM Wednesdays. The gallery is located at 51 Greene Street, between Broome and Grand.