Deborah Remington: A Life in Drawing, 1950 - 2006
October 15 - November 26, 2016
“My work concerns the paradoxes of visual perception, the enigmas and quirks, and how it all forms the basis for our realities. The impact, excitement, and energies created by incongruity, juxtaposition and opposites all interest me.” – DR
Parrasch Heijnen Gallery is pleased to announce Deborah Remington: A Life in Drawing, 1950 – 2006, the first ever career survey of the late artist’s works on paper.
This exhibition comprises over thirty works from fifty-six years of Remington’s practice in drawing, encompassing the artist’s diverse styles: from the more traditional abstract works of the late fifties, to her closely rendered signature shield forms of the sixties and seventies, to a synthesis of six decades in the later works.
A renegade in every sense of the word, Remington (1930-2010), a relative of American painter Frederic Remington (1861-1909), earned her B.F.A. in 1955 from the California School of Fine Arts (later renamed the San Francisco Art Institute), where she studied with Clyfford Still, David Park and Elmer Bischoff, among others. While still in school, she became immersed in the Beat scene and was one of the six artists and poets – and only woman – who founded the Six Gallery in 1954, where Allen Ginsberg first recited “Howl” in public on October 7, 1955. Remington spent two years in Japan after graduating, where traditional eastern elements such as calligraphy and sumi-e painting inspired the rigid yet mystical imagery that remained present in her work until her death.
In many of Remington’s drawings, floating shield-like shapes are organized around a central axis. These images, which are bilaterally symmetrical, are at once organic and machine-like. The frontal shapes suggest mirrors and armor, forms that have roots in both the imagery of Surrealism and the Machine Age.
Remington’s career burgeoned in the 1960s when she had three solo shows at the famed Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco and one at the San Francisco Museum of Art. In 1963 she was the only woman to show at Dilexi’s short-lived Los Angeles gallery alongside Joe Goode and H.C. Westermann. In New York, she exhibited at Bykert Gallery starting in 1967 together with Chuck Close, Brice Marden, and Dorothea Rockburne, to name a few. A twenty-year retrospective exhibition of Remington’s work, curated by Paul Schimmel, was held at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, (Newport Beach, CA) in 1983 (now Orange County Museum of Art), and traveled to the Oakland Museum of Art as well as several other venues.
More recently, Remington’s work has been featured in several solo and group exhibitions including Wallspace, New York (2015), Kimmerich Gallery, Berlin (2015-16), Women of Abstract Expressionism, a traveling exhibition organized by the Denver Art Museum with a catalogue published in association with Yale University Press (2016), and Psychedelic: Optical and Visionary Art Since the 1960s, which opened at the San Antonio Museum of Art in 2010 and traveled widely throughout the United States. Remington was the recipient of numerous grants and awards in her lifetime including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1984), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1979), and a Tamarind Fellowship (1973), among others. She was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1999 and received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant that same year.
Deborah Remington: A Life in Drawing, 1950 – 2006 is organized with Jay Gorney in association with Margaret Berenson of the Deborah Remington Charitable Trust for the Visual Arts.
For images, biography, and further information, please contact Parrasch Heijnen Gallery at info@parraschheijnen.com or at (323) 943-9373 during business hours (Tues-Sat, 11a – 6p).
