Jay DeFeo’s Transcendent Objects
Alice Godwin explores the shifts in Jay DeFeo’s practice in the 1970s, considering the familiar objects that became recurrent subjects in her work during these years and their relationship to the human body.
I’ve always got to get down there and show what is underneath everything.
—Jay DeFeo
Gagosian is pleased to present works by Jay DeFeo on 8-bridges, a newly launched online platform created to highlight artists and galleries in the San Francisco Bay Area. Honoring the rich history of the Bay Area art scene, the inaugural presentation features selected works from the exhibition Transcending Definition: Jay DeFeo in the 1970s, on view at Gagosian, San Francisco, through December 11, 2020. DeFeo spent most of her life in the San Francisco Bay Area and remains an influential figure in the region. The 8-bridges presentation focuses on the artist’s output in the decade following the completion of her pivotal work The Rose (1958–66), when she was based in Marin County, just north of San Francisco. In her paintings, photographs, and works on paper of the 1970s, DeFeo fused the representational with the abstract, permeating her images of everyday objects—a camera tripod, a jewelry fragment, a shoe tree—with a sense of mystery. The artist described her works of this period as “beings suspended in space and time” that “transcend the definition of the literal objects from which they are derived.”
Jay DeFeo, Figure V (Tripod series), 1976 © 2020 The Jay DeFeo Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Robert Divers Herrick
