Today from our partners at Art Practical, we bring you a review of Jay DeFeo/Alter Ego at Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco. Author Anton Stuebner notes, “In reconceptualizing the forms of her everyday life, DeFeo’s work suggests the importance of embracing the imaginary and the real as necessary complements.” This article was originally published on October 1, 2015.

Jay DeFeo, Untitled, 1973; gelatin silver print, 7 3/4 x 9 9/16 in., Estate no. P0778A. May not be reproduced in any form without permission of The Jay DeFeo Trust, © 2015 The Jay DeFeo Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Shadows suffuse Jay DeFeo’s work. In her gelatin silver prints, familiar objects suddenly become insidious, the high-contrast black-and-white exposures revealing breaks and fissures in what we might otherwise regard as impervious surfaces. The amorphous graphite and charcoal fields in her works on paper, conversely, suggest vortices of depth and motion, and are both unsettling and exhilarating in their free-form abstraction. Her photo and ink collages are densely layered, bordering on the monstrous, their shapes reminiscent of wings and body parts. And her massive grayscale canvases depict violently jutting shapes suspended against unplumbed backdrops of black paint, evoking flight and, inevitably, descent.

Throughout her career, DeFeo (1929–1989) experimented with form, perspective, and light in order to explore the undersides of things, the unseen. Although she took primary inspiration from everyday objects—a shoe, a protractor, a potted plant—these things functioned as points of departure for much stranger and darker imaginings. The fifty-five works included in Jay DeFeo/Alter Ego, now on view at Hosfelt Gallery, offer compelling insights into DeFeo’s multidisciplinary practice, which encompassed painting, photography, drawing, collage, and assemblage. But if the breadth of works on display suggests the expansiveness of her art, it is also indicative of DeFeo’s tireless intellect and her myriad attempts to represent the instability of the material world around her.

Read the full article here.