Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is pleased to present its first solo exhibition featuring the work of Jay DeFeo. Jay DeFeo: Ingredients of Alchemy, Before and After The Rose will include thirty paintings and drawings, dating from the early 1950s to the late 1980s, offering an overview of the artist’s career. Labeled an “abstract expressionist,” “Beat painter” and “symbolist,” DeFeo – a central figure in the California avant-garde – produced a heroic body of drawings, photographs and paintings, challenging the conventions of twentieth-century American art. Known for her legendary painting The Rose (now in the collection of The Whitney Museum of American Art), DeFeo consistently explored single, inanimate forms which she deliberately distorted and mystified, transforming them into magical, provocative images executed predominantly in shades of black and white.