Deborah Remington: Posing VISUAL ESSAY
Best known for her abstract paintings with interlocking machine-like shapes, intense color juxtapositions and ambiguous luminosity, Deborah Remington (b. Haddonfield, NJ, 1930, d. 2010) began her artistic career as the abstract expressionist movement was starting to wane. Although her painting style eventually evolved toward a somewhat austere and well-disciplined combination of illusionism and hard-edge minimalism, her rebellious nature was characteristic of the AbEx generation. As a student at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco in 1954, she was one of the co-founders of the first Beat gallery, known as Six Gallery, where Allen Ginsburg read his epic poem, Howl, in public for the first time in 1955.
This portfolio collects a series of black and white photographs, Posing Series, taken by Remington in 1950, when she was a college student at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco
(later the San Francisco Art Institute). The photographs were discovered only recently among the artist’s archival documents, which were given by the Remington Trust to the Special Collections and University Archives/Rutgers University Libraries upon the artist’s death in 2010. They were then published as a series for the first time.
Working most likely with a fellow student in the role of photographer, Remington sourced locations in and around the school and posed in a variety of costumes, often hamming it up for the camera. The photographs present her experimenting with posing postures— as if for an imaginary fashion magazine—disclosing Remington’s lively spontaneity and sense of fun, as well as the free-flowing gestural energy and sensuous aspects of her future works.