Deanna Thompson at Kayne Griffin Corcoran

Kayne Griffin Corcoran is pleased to present a survey in memoriam of Deanna Thompson (1958-2015). Thompson began her career as a painter in Los Angeles before moving to Yucca Valley in the 1990s. For more than three decades, she was influenced by the vast landscape of the California desert. Largely living and working in isolation, Thompson explored the modern tension between society and her overwhelming natural environment.

 
Thompson’s paintings describe a sense of beauty found in the marks of human activity passed. Her works reinvent the romantic view of landscape, painting in favor of one that is unsentimental and rooted firmly in the moment. Through her subject matter of deserted homesteads, discarded man-made objects, and castoff cars, Thompson addressed issues of memory, time and the forgotten by reframing the material components of modern life to create dense portraits of the world as it surrounds us. These objects—placed between wide, flattened fields of earth and sky—are charged with a highly detailed hand and offer a shifting level of complexity, ranging from realism to abstraction.