BORTOLAMI

Deborah Remington

Illustrated Chronology

Deborah Remington’s work has been widely collected by major institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Pompidou, The Art Institute of Chicago, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, , Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, among dozens of other museums. During her lifetime Remington exhibited at such prestigious galleries as the Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco, the Bykert Gallery in New York and Galerie Darthea Speyer in Paris. A twenty-year retrospective (1963-1983) curated by Paul Schimmel opened at the Orange County Museum of Art in in 1983 and traveled to the Oakland Museum of California, among other venues. Remington was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1984) a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1979) and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (1999).

39 WALKER STREET NEW YORK NY 10013 T 212 727 2050 BORTOLAMIGALLERY.COM Deborah Remington in her New York studio, 1974 1930 Born in Haddonfield, New Jersey

1944 After a four-year battle with leukemia, Remington’s father passes away. Remington and her mother relocate to Pasadena, CA.

1945-48 Attends Pasadena High School and Pasadena Junior College, where she meets future collaborators , John Ryan and David Simpson, friends with whom Remington would found the influential 6 Gallery in San Francisco.

1949 Enrolls in the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco (now the San Francisco Art Institute) and studies with Elmer Bischoff, Deborah Remington, , Hayward King, John Ryan, and Wally Hedrick , and , among others. at 6 Gallery, San Francisco, 1955 1952 Marries the writer and poet Don Johnson. The couple subsequently moves just north of San Francisco to Healdsburg, CA. The marriage lasts just 2 years and Remington returns to San Francisco.

1954 Joins fellow artists Wally Hedrick, Hayward King, John Ryan, David Simpson and the poet Jack Spicer as a founder of 6 Gallery on Fillmore Street in San Francisco. It becomes an essential venue for Beat-era art exhibitions, music and poetry readings. On October 7, 1955, famously delivers his first public reading of the poem at 6 Gallery. Soot Series 2, 1963, Soot and red crayon on muslin, 18 1/2 x 13 in (47 x 33 cm) In 1963, Remington began the series using soot she collected from her fireplace.

1955 Completes the Bachelor of Fine Arts program at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). She is among an inaugural class of 9 students.

1956- Embarks on a residency in Japan to study calligraphy and 58 sumi-e , a deeply impactful influence on her practice.

1958 After her extensive travels in Japan and Southeast Asia, Remington returns to San Francisco via a freighter ship on which she was the only female passenger. Upon her return, Remington is hired to teach traditional Japanese calligraphy at SFAI.

Inspired by marsh grasses which grow along the coastal inlets of San Francisco Bay, she begins a series of expressive pen and ink drawings.

1962 Remington has her first solo show at the Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco. She exhibits at locations of the gallery in San Francisco in Los Angeles through 1965.

Big Red, 1962, Oil on canvas, 75 x 69 in (190.5 x 175.3cm) Remington at the opening reception for a 1965 group exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art.

1963 Remington transitions from the gestural, Abstract Expressionist paint application for which she was known into an entirely new aesthetic. She begins to paint crisp, highly articulated lines and carefully rendered tonal gradations. The surfaces of her become almost completely flat.“I love thick, gooey paint,” Remington recalled in the catalog for her 1983 retrospective. “But for what I was doing with the imagery, it simply got in the way.”

1965 The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) acquires the painting Statement, 1963. Remington believed this painting marked an important shift in her work in that it

featured hard edges, a restricted palette of red and blue and Statement, 1963. Oil on canvas, 76 5/8 x 70 in (195 x 177.8 cm) a strong, centralized composition. Collection of SFMoMA, San Francisco, CA

Seeking a more vibrant artist community and better professional opportunities, Remington moves to New York and stays with a friend in SoHo. She continues to exhibit in San Francisco and her work is reviewed in Artforum. The Whitney Museum of American Art includes Remington in its 1965 Painting Annual exhibition. 1966 New York’s prestigious Bykert Gallery, under the directorship of Klaus Kertess, hosts Remington’s first New York solo show. She has three additional solo exhibitions before the gallery closes in 1975.

The Whitney Museum of American Art acquires Haddonfield, 1965, named after the artist’s hometown in New Jersey.

Remington recalls the impact this purchase had on her career: After the Whitney purchased one of my paintings, my phone rang constantly for six weeks. Dealers, collectors and other artists— most of whom I had never met—wanted to see my work and talk about it. (From SFAI News: July, 1966).

Haddonfield,1965. Oil on canvas, 74 x 69 in (188 x 175 cm) Collection of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY 1968 Darthea Speyer, a dealer known for exhibiting American artists in France, invites Remington to exhibit in the inaugural show of her new Paris gallery, which coincides with the May 1968 riots. The show sells out and receives enthusiastic press. Remington continues to show with Speyer through the early 1990s and she briefly lives between New York and Paris.

1969 Remington purchases her loft at 309 West Broadway in SoHo where she resides for the rest of her life. Memphis, 1969, Oil on linen, 60 x 53 in (152.4 x 134.6 cm) 1970 Exhibits two large-scale paintings: Memphis and Devon, both 1969, at Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, in L’art vivant aux Etats- Unis, a group show curated by New York-based critic Dore Ashton. The exhibition includes work by Carl Andre, Lee Bontecou, Hans Haacke, Brice Marden, and Louise Nevelson.

1973-81 Following the recent death of her mother and some medical problems of her own, Remington begins a printmaking residency at the Tamarind Institute at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

Remington renovating her loft at 309 West Broadway in SoHo, 1966 Installation view of Remington’s show at Galerie Darthea Speyer, Paris, 1968, with Darthea Speyer 1973 Encouraged by Dore Ashton, Remington accepts a teaching position at Cooper Union. She remains a professor there for 24 years.

Remington is interviewed by the Smithsonian Institute for nine hours of recorded conversations for its Archives of American Art.

My work is very hard to criticize. It’s very hard to deal with on a critical level because you have really basically nothing to categorize it with or a niche to put it in. They tried laying Georgia O’Keeffe on me for a while and Picabia for a while, and none of that works because it’s not. Now, finally, people are beginning to deal with my work...in a way that it has a uniqueness because it doesn’t relate to anything you’ve ever seen before.

Remington at the Tamarind Institute, Dorset, 1972, Oil on canvas, 91 x 87 in (231 x 221 cm) Albuquerque, NM, 1973 Dorset, 1972, detail Alexandra Anderson, “A Singular Painter Sees Double,” The Village Voice, 6 September 1976 1979 Remington receives a National Endowment for the Arts grant.

1980 Receives diagnosis of breast cancer and begins treatment.

1983 The Orange County Museum of Art, then The Newport Harbor Art Museum in CA, hosts Remington’s first major career retrospective. The show is organized by curator Paul Schimmel. The critic Dore Ashton writes the lead essay in “Deborah Remington: A 20-Year Survey,” the artist’s first major catalogue. The show travels to the Oakland Museum and the exhibition is reviewed in The San Francisco Chronicle and other Bay Area publications.

1984-88 The artist is awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship to pursue a “change in direction.” Remington exhibits a new series of paintings with organic, expressive shapes at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York’s East Village in 1987 and the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles in 1988.

Auriga, 1980, Oil on canvas, 74 x 50 in (188 x 127 cm) Selected paintings in museum collections

Saxon, 1966-67, Moultrie, 1967, Untitled, No. 4, 1969, Chatham, 1973, Oil on canvas, Oil on canvas, Oil on canvas, Oil on canvas, 72 7/8 x 70 7/8 in (185 x 180cm), 60 x 53 in (152 x 134 cm), 20 x 18 in (50 x 45 cm) 78 x 74 in (198 x 188 cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Toledo Museum of Art, Washington D.C. Indianapolis, IN Hartford, CT Toledo, OH

Pitt, 1973, Dalton, 1974, Canea, 1977, Aryx, 1982, Oil on canvas, Oil on canvas, Oil on canvas, Oil on canvas, 20 x 18 in (50 x 45 cm) 56 x 52 in (142 x 132 cm) 20 x 18 in (50 x 45 cm), 74 x 50 in (188 x 127 cm) Art Institue of Chicago, Carnegie Museum of Art, Toledo Museum of Art, Worcester Art Museum, Chicago, IL Pittsburgh, PA Toledo, OH Worcester, MA 1990s Remington’s work underwent a dramatic transformation in the 1990s and early 2000s, as seen in Mechelen, 1991. After decades of deliberately avoiding any brushstroke or evidence of her own hand, Remington reverted to a gestural painting not seen since her early AbEx works. The distinct centrifugal shapes, for which she was known, evolved into botanical reds, greens and violets which were surrounded by a field of splintered, silvery grays.

1993 Diagnosed with lung cancer and undergoes treatment.

1994-99 Begins teaching in the MFA program at ’s School of Fine Art

Mechelen, 1991, Oil on canvas, 64 x 47 in (162.6 x 119.4 cm) Mechelen, 1991, detail Beinen III, 1998, Graphite and red crayon on paper, Beinen V, 2006, Graphite and red crayon on paper, 72 x 42 in (183 x 106.7 cm) 72 x 42 in (183 x 106.7 cm)

1997 Begins Beinen series, 6’ tall drawings in which abstractions resembling ribcages and other bone structures are portrayed in graphite and crayon.

1999 Elected to the National Academy of Design and is awarded a prestigious Pollock-Krasner Grant

2001 Mitchell Algus Gallery in New York hosts a solo show for the artist: Reconstructing Abstraction that provides a concise overview of her career. Among the works on view was Eridan, 2001, which she describes as a “breakthrough painting.” In it, is evidence of the rib-cage imagery from the Beinen series; yet here, the distinctive bones begin to break apart, collapse and fold in on themselves, as if dissolving. Remington in her New York studio, circa 2001

2001 Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Remington experiences difficulty breathing in her SoHo loft. She temporarily moves to her summer home in Pennsylvania.

2003 Finishes Calyd, 1999-2003. As with other late paintings, Remington takes a number of years to complete this work as she is treated for cancer. It is one of her most dynamic and explosive compositions. Shimmering, radiant forms project outwards and nearly extend past the edges of the canvas. Calyd, 1999-2003, Oil on canvas, 64 x 47 in (162.6 x 119.4 cm) A view outside Remington’s solo show at Mitchell Algus Gallery, New York, 2001

2003-10 Teaches at the National Academy School of Fine Arts, New York.

2004 Lung cancer returns and Remington has one of her lungs partially removed.

Remington completes Episode, one of her final paintings.

Episode, 2004, Oil on linen, 32 x 24 in (81.3 x 61 cm) 2007 Completes her final work, Encounters. The painting reflects aspects from several decades of Remington’s output – a resemblance to the emblematic composition and color palette of her 1970s paintings well as the expressive mark making from her paintings in the 1980s and 1990s.

2010 Deborah Remington passes away from complications of breast and lung cancer in Moorestown, New Jersey, not far from her birthplace in Haddonfield.

Encounters, 2007, Oil on canvas, 72 x 67 in (183 x 170 cm) Encounters, 2007, detail 2015 Gallerist and curator Jay Gorney organizes Deborah Remington: 1963- 1983 at Wallspace Gallery in New York.

2016 Remington’s work is included in Women of Abstract Expressionism, Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado. The show travels to the Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina and Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, California.

Deborah Remington: 1963-1983, Installation view, Wallspace, New York, NY, 2015 Deborah Remington installing Devon at Fondation Maeght, 1970

Images © 2021 Deborah Remington Charitable Trust for the Visual Arts. Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY