An exhibition of paintings by Jay DeFeo will open at Paula Cooper Gallery on October 30th, 2025. Dating from 1982–1989, the works mark DeFeo’s triumphant return to oil paint sixteen years after the completion of her masterpiece, The Rose, in 1966. Across large, abstract canvases and intimately scaled works on linen DeFeo reveled in the rediscovered tactility of the medium, producing sensuous paintings with increased fluidity of form and line. This will be the first exhibition in New York to focus solely on DeFeo’s painting, and the most significant gathering of DeFeo’s work in oil since her retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2012–2013. An illustrated catalogue with a new essay by Jordan Stein will accompany the exhibition.

The 1980s brought stability and some financial security to DeFeo’s life and career as she expanded her studio, became a tenured professor at Mills College, Oakland, and had regular gallery representation. DeFeo’s renewed energy is evident in the ambitious scale of the works (both large and small, the latter a new size for DeFeo paintings) and her embrace of new materials, colors and techniques. Correspondence and images in the artist’s archive reveal the exhaustive research that supported her process and decision-making, and the prior drawings, photographs and photocopy collages that provided originating source material for the painted forms. Resounding with the echoes of earlier works and cut short by her untimely death at age sixty in 1989, DeFeo’s paintings of the 1980s are in every sense a culmination of her career.

In each of the paintings in the main gallery, gestural abstractions centered around single, purposeful forms emerge from muted backgrounds. Some––Geisha II, 1984/1987, Untitled (Reclining Figure), 1986, and Bride, 1986––are modeled on still lives assembled by the artist, while others––Hawk Moon No. 1, 1983-85, The Assignment, 1983––are derived from DeFeo’s collages of printed materials. Although informed by identifiable sources, each work becomes transformed, in DeFeo’s words, “from objective reality toward an inner reality.”[1] In the front gallery, small, instinctively created canvases (none larger than 20 by 19 inches) achieve monumentality on an intimate scale. The majority are from DeFeo’s Alabama Hills series and inspired by the landscapes she encountered in central California. Rather than depicting any specific feature of a real landscape, the works are intended to evoke the feeling of climbing a mountain and the transformative potential of a metaphorical ascent.

There will be two public programs during the exhibition. On November 1st, writer Jordan Stein and artist Trisha Donnelly, concurrently the subject of a one-person exhibition at The Drawing Center, will lead a walkthrough of the exhibition. On December 11th, renowned harpist Zeena Parkins will be joined by percussionist William Winant for the East Coast premiere of her new composition Modesty of the Magic Thing, 2025. Inspired by DeFeo’s drawing series Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1989, this performance will present a rare opportunity to encounter Parkins’s music alongside DeFeo’s art.

[1] Jay DeFeo, slide lecture at University of California, Santa Cruz, May 10, 1989. Video recording, Archive of The Jay DeFeo Foundation, Berkeley, CA