Deborah Remington

(1930 – 2010)


An artist who pursued her own distinctive form of illusion and abstraction, Deborah Remington was a descendant of the Western artist Frederic Remington. She trained at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she studied painting under the prominent Abstract Expressionist painter Clyfford Still, and was part of the Bay Area Beat scene during the 1950s. She was among a group of six painters and poets, and the only woman, who in 1954 founded the Six Gallery in San Francisco, a gallery converted from a garage, where Allen Ginsberg held his first public reading of his legendary poem, Howl. Remington traveled widely through Asia after graduation, and spent two years in Japan studying calligraphy and sumi-e painting. In the 1960s she divided her time between New York and Paris, and exhibited nationally and internationally.

She worked repeatedly at Tamarind Institute between 1973-1978. The experience of lithography brought new complexity to her painting, and her color palette intensified after her collaboration at Tamarind. The last remaining edition from Remington’s collaborations is Davos, a fourteen-color lithograph with a complex blend roll ranging from deep olive to dark Prussian blue. This print was selected for inclusion in Tamarind’s anniversary portfolio Suite Fifteen.

Remington is represented in museum collections worldwide including Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, San Francisco; Auckland Museum, New Zealand; Centre d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, Paris; Denver Art Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.