Remington occupies a particular position in postwar American abstraction, formed by the Bay Area Abstract Expressionists, sustained by the discipline of Asian calligraphy, and resolved into a hard-edge idiom that owes nothing to the geometric traditions to which her work is sometimes assimilated.
Remington came to art early. She studied in Philadelphia as a teenager and then crossed the country to enroll at the California School of Fine Arts, the most important West Coast training ground of the postwar period. Her teachers there placed her at the centre of the Bay Area's Abstract Expressionist generation while it was still in formation, and her four years in San Francisco coincided exactly with the moment that the Beat scene, the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, and West Coast abstract painting were emerging as recognizable cultural forces.
Her involvement in founding the Six Gallery placed her at one of the literal birthplaces of those movements. The cooperative space on Fillmore Street, run by young artists clustered around the California School of Fine Arts, became a working studio and exhibition venue for the Bay Area avant-garde and, the following year, the site of the Howl reading that announced the Beat Generation. Remington's role as one of the six founders, and the only woman among them, has often been underrecognized in the standard histories of the period.
The two postgraduate years in Japan, Southeast Asia, and India were as decisive for her work as anything that came before. The study of calligraphy gave her a model for working with mark, edge, and figure-ground relationships that would inform her painting for the rest of her life. The work she produced after her return, first shown at the Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco in the early 1960s, moved gradually away from gestural Bay Area abstraction toward the highly resolved, mirror-symmetrical paintings for which she is now best known.
The move east gave her work its mature exhibition life. Her first solo show at the Bykert Gallery in 1966 introduced the New York audience to her distinctive vocabulary, paintings dominated by a single luminous, often brushed-metal-like central form set within a deep, resonant color field, refusing both the psychological openness of Abstract Expressionism and the mechanical literalism of Op or Minimalist work. Critics have sometimes grouped her loosely with the hard-edge tradition of Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland, but her work is finally less geometric than it appears, organized as much by the intuitive logic of calligraphy and the residue of figural reference as by any system.
Her standing within late twentieth-century American abstraction received institutional recognition through a long sequence of fellowships, elections, and exhibitions, including a mid-career retrospective at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in California in 1983. Her work has continued to be reassessed and exhibited in the years since her death, and she is now widely recognized as one of the most original and underappreciated American abstract painters of the postwar period.