Deborah Remington was one of the most distinctive American hard-edge abstractionists of her generation, an artist whose mirror-bright, mechanically precise paintings drew on Bay Area Beat-era beginnings and a long study of Asian calligraphy to produce a body of work entirely her own.
Deborah Remington (June 25, 1930 – April 21, 2010) was an American abstract painter, born in Haddonfield, New Jersey, and best known for the precisely structured, hard-edge abstractions she developed across the 1960s and 1970s. She trained at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), where she earned her BFA in 1955 under Elmer Bischoff and Clyfford Still, and where she helped establish a foundational presence in the postwar Bay Area scene as one of the six artists — and the only woman — who founded San Francisco's now-legendary Six Gallery in 1954, the cooperative space that would host Allen Ginsberg's first reading of Howl the following year. After graduation she spent two years living and traveling in Japan, Southeast Asia, and India, where she studied classical and contemporary calligraphy.
She moved to New York in 1965, the city in which her mature style consolidated and her career took its full international form. Her work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Centre Pompidou, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, among other institutions, and she received the Tamarind Fellowship (1973), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1979–80), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1984), election to the National Academy of Design (1999), a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and the Academy's Benjamin Altman Prize for Painting (2003).