Art

Deborah Remington

A long overdue survey of this exceptional artist, a renegade in every sense of the word, celebrating her legacy as an original member of the Beat Generation in San Francisco and abstract painter in New York.

This first comprehensive monograph on Remington (1930–2010) examines her extraordinary career through paintings, prints, and drawings. An enthusiastic participant in the Bay Area’s Beat scene in the early 1950s, Remington made her way to New York in 1965, where she joined the prestigious Bykert Gallery and quickly gained critical attention. Luminous and saturated, her hard-edged abstractions of the 1960s and 1970s are well known; yet the work from the last twenty-five years of her life is not as familiar to art world audiences. After a mid-career survey in 1983, Remington returned to a poetic, gestural sensibility that evoked the natural world and, eventually, her ailing body. This publication traces the arc of these evolutions through lavish illustrations as well as a broad range of texts that includes scholarly essays, remembrances, an interview, and a narrative chronology. Extensive research reveals the artist’s innermost thoughts, enhancing our understanding of the art world during her time. This long overdue examination of her career reveals a visionary artist untethered to the trends and art movements of her own lifetime and prime for rediscovery.

About The Author

Margaret Mathews Berenson is director of the Deborah Remington Charitable Trust for the Visual Arts. Carroll Dunham is an artist and writer based in New York and Connecticut. Stephanie M. Hohlios is assistant professor of art history at Flagler College, St. Augustine, Florida. Suzanne Hudson is professor of art history and fine arts at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Anna Katz is curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Nancy Lim is associate curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Paul Schimmel is an independent curator based in Los Angeles.

  • Publish Date: September 24, 2024
  • Format: Hardcover
  • Category: Art - Individual Artists - Monographs
  • Publisher: Rizzoli Electa
  • Trim Size: 9-1/2 x 12
  • Pages: 256
  • US Price: $65.00
  • CDN Price: $85.00
  • ISBN: 978-0-8478-3414-3

Reviews

"Bortolami is presenting the second solo exhibition by Deborah Remington (b. 1930, d. 2010) at the gallery. Mirrors features works from three distinct junctures in Remington’s career, from some of the artist’s most iconic compositions to rare and never before exhibited paintings. The exhibition coincides with the release of the artist’s first monograph, published by Rizzoli Electa.

Remington achieved notoriety in the early 1960s for an inscrutable approach to hard edge abstraction, painting an iconography of irregular, organic shapes rendered with startling precision. Her heraldic imagery, both biomorphic and mechanistic at once, encircled luminous, mirror-like surfaces painted with gradients of black, white and gray. She painted the irregular perimeter of each shape with brilliant bands of orange, blue or green, as if the metallic surfaces within were a conduit for the bold, electric lines which surrounded them. ~ARTDAILY.COM

Author Bookshelf: Suzanne Hudson