Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is pleased to present its first solo exhibition featuring the work of Jay DeFeo (American, 1929-1989). Jay DeFeo: Ingredients of Alchemy, Before and After The Rose will include thirty paintings and drawings, dating from the early 1950s to the late 1980s, offering an overview of the artist’s career. Labeled an “abstract expressionist,” “Beat painter” and “symbolist,” DeFeo – a central figure in the California avant-garde – produced a heroic body of drawings, photographs and paintings, challenging the conventions of twentieth century American art. Known for her legendary painting The Rose (now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art), DeFeo consistently explored single, inanimate forms which she deliberately distorted and mystified, transforming them into magical, provocative images executed predominantly in shades of black and white.

Born Mary Joan in Hanover, New Hampshire, Jay DeFeo was raised in San Francisco, rural northern California and Colorado. She received her introduction to art from a neighbor - a “how to draw” book that exposed her to the principles of design and basic geometric forms that would later persist in her art. In 1946, she attended the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned both her B.A. and M.A. degrees. Awarded the Sigmund Martin Heller Traveling Fellowship in 1951, the first woman to be honored with this distinguished prize, DeFeo traveled to Europe spending time in Paris and London and also Florence, where she painted prodigiously for six months. Upon her return to the United States, DeFeo settled in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she became a central figure in the California avant-garde along with friends Bruce Connor, Joan Brown, George Herms and Wallace Berman.

DeFeo had her first solo exhibition in 1954 at The Place, a tavern and Beat poet hangout in San Francisco’s North Beach before exhibiting at the legendary Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1960. Throughout her life, DeFeo also taught art - at the San Francisco Art Institute, the California College of Arts and Crafts, and in the 1980s, at Mills College. Although the work of Jay DeFeo has been exhibited consistently over the years, mainly on the West Coast, her inclusion in the 1995 exhibition Beat Culture and the New America: 1950-1965 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, has recently redefined her significance in twentieth-century American art and has demanded a reexamination of her entire life’s oeuvre. Jay DeFeo is represented in numerous museum collections including The Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Menil Collection, The Museum of Modern Art and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

This exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated color catalogue featuring a foreword by Lisa Phillips, Director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and an essay by Carter Ratcliff.