NEW YORK, NY.- Mitchell-Innes & Nash announced its representation of the work of Jay DeFeo through The Jay DeFeo Trust.

Jay DeFeo (1929-1989) was a groundbreaking artist whose career spanned four decades and many genres. She accomplished her very personal, intimate vision using every medium available to her, including painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, photography and Xeroxed imagery. DeFeo is well known for her monumental painting The Rose, a massive canvas laden with thick layers of paint that took the artist eight years to complete. This painting forms the centerpiece of a retrospective exhibition currently on view at The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, through June 2. The retrospective introduces viewers to the impressively diverse range of DeFeo’s work, and illuminates her visionary approach to art as well as her experimental use of materials.

Jay DeFeo was born in New Hampshire and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was a pivotal figure of the 1950s Beat culture of artist, poets, and musicians. Her earliest work showed the influence of Abstract Expressionism, as well as the European post-War painters she encountered on a trip through France and Italy in the early 1950s. But DeFeo quickly developed her own particular style based on a fusion of meticulous representation and dramatic abstraction.

DeFeo’s exhibition career began in the late 1950s, with her first major solo show held at Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco. In 1959 DeFeo’s art, along with that of Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Louise Nevelson, and others, was included in Dorothy Miller’s momentous exhibition Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles mounted her next solo exhibition in 1960. Her first solo museum show took place in 1969 at the Pasadena Art Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Art, where The Rose was exhibited for the first time. DeFeo’s work is included in many public collections, notably those of The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, among others.