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.

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.