To DeFeo, space was not a fixed backdrop, but an active, dynamic force—one that unfolded through time, perception, and sustained looking.
 

Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to present Jay DeFeo: Space Exploration, the gallery’s fifth exhibition devoted to the work of the legendary artist. A key figure in the Bay Area Beat culture of the 1950s and a pioneering voice within postwar American art, Jay DeFeo (1929–1989) continues to inspire generations of artists through the extraordinary ambition, material inventiveness, and conceptual rigor of her art.

Space Exploration examines a central and recurring concern in DeFeo’s oeuvre—the investigation of space, understood both as the vast, unknowable expanse of the cosmos and as a site of intense formal and perceptual inquiry within the artwork itself. DeFeo often conceived of her works as portals, a closely related concept, where a viewer might cross thresholds, enter voids, or encounter forces that exceed ordinary experience. As the artist once wrote, “…I am becoming increasingly drawn to the possibilities – or statements about space that the image is capable of evoking.” [1] 

The exhibition brings together primarily works on paper and select paintings dating from 1975 to 1989 that demonstrate DeFeo’s sustained engagement with spatial depth, compression, and expansion. Radiating forms, central voids, dense accumulations of material, and finely calibrated graphite fields evoke stellar phenomena such as gravity, orbit, and implosion, while simultaneously foregrounding the physical labor of mark-making and surface building.

Space Exploration includes significant works from several of DeFeo’s key series, including Tripod, Compass, Minnie, Samurai, Seven Dwarfs, and Reflections of Africa, each of which reveals a distinct approach to spatial construction and metaphor. In many works, space appears to pulse or recede, drawing the viewer inward and destabilizing conventional distinctions between interior and exterior, figure and ground.  Discussing the influence of Cezanne, DeFeo said, “we’re going to use tension in a positive way here, the tension of going back into space or forward into space, that push-and-pull thing kind of creates an invisible balance…and it’s that balance that isn’t actually directly painted there but is an unknown factor between two opposites that he created spatially, and which I am trying to create through some of these seemingly contradictory things in my own work.” [2] 

As in much of DeFeo’s work, the genesis of these spatial investigations often lies in the close observation of the everyday world. Reflecting on a shift in her art, DeFeo noted, “I was always interested in space, but now, the space has become illusionary. This is not 3D like The Rose, well, a little bit of surface texture to be sure, but it’s illusionary space, in the sense of the Renaissance.” [3] Ordinary fragments, gestures, and materials are transformed into sites of visual and metaphysical intensity, suggesting that cosmic space and lived space are deeply intertwined. To DeFeo, space was not a fixed backdrop, but an active, dynamic force—one that unfolded through time, perception, and sustained looking.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Marc Selwyn Fine Art will host a talk between Laura Hoptman, Executive Director of The Drawing Center of New York, and Leah Levy, Executive Director of The Jay DeFeo Foundation, in the gallery on Saturday, February 7, 2026. A light breakfast will be served at 11:00 am, followed by the talk at 11:30 am. The program will focus on Space Exploration and Jay DeFeo’s enduring contributions to postwar and contemporary art.

Jay DeFeo’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the de Young Museum, San Francisco; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Tate Modern, London; the British Museum, London; and the Menil Collection, Houston, among many others. In Los Angeles, her work can be found in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Norton Simon Museum, the Hammer Museum, and the J. Paul Getty Museum.

In 2013, the Whitney Museum of American Art organized Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective, which travelled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. More recent museum exhibitions include Jay DeFeo: Trees at the Laguna Art Museum in 2024 and Jay DeFeo: The Ripple Effect organized by Le Consortium in Dijon, France in 2018, which travelled to the Aspen Art Museum.

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[1] Jay DeFeo, letter to James Kelly, December 20, 1981. Archive of The Jay DeFeo Foundation, Berkeley, CA (JDF no. Corr1080). Original in the Jay DeFeo Papers at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

[2] Jay DeFeo, interview with Sidra Stich, October 9, 1988.  Audio recording, Archive of The Jay DeFeo Foundation, Berkeley, CA.
[3] Jay DeFeo, lecture at the San Francisco Art Institute, February 11, 1980. Audio recording, Archive of The Jay DeFeo Foundation, Berkeley, CA.