Painter Deborah Kass looks back on her two-decade career

“For this piece, I was riffing on someone who I thought was a very important artist: David Salle. But I was coming at his work from a feminist perspective: There’s a male figure instead of the female one in the Salle painting I borrowed from, and I overlaid a portrait of Picasso. The abstraction above references Jackson Pollock, another artist I’ve appropriated, while the title comes from James Joyce.”

Photograph: Courtesy the artist/Paul Kasmin Gallery

“When I made this painting in 1992, multiculturalism and identity issues were the topics of the day. But I realized that there was a hole  that needed to be filled in that discussion regarding Jewishness. It felt like it was my civic duty to bring it up. I wanted to include my Jewish identity in the discourse in the way that made me feel excited and enlivened but still somewhat unseen.”

Photograph: Courtesy the artist/Paul Kasmin Gallery

“This image of former MoMA curator Robert Storr was from a series of portraits of curators titled ‘Most Wanted.’ Basically it’s about how I ‘wanted’ attention from them and luckily, they were all happy to pose. The little signs on them are coded to represent the name of their institution at the time and when they started there. I didn’t show these works when I made them, even though there was interest to do so. I’d been exhibiting a lot of work based on Warhol, and just felt that anymore would be redundant. I finally exhibited this past spring at Sargents Daughters on the Lower East Side. Sixteen years later, everyone in the series looks young and adorable.”

Photograph: Courtesy the artist/Paul Kasmin Gallery

“For eight years, I’d been doing this ongoing series, ‘The Warhol Project,’ for which I was painting portraits of myself based on one of Andy’s self-portraits— sort of playing at being him. Here, while the work still looks like his, I’m no longer representing myself as Warhol but as Deb. I used his image of Liz Taylor because it’s so iconic, and she was this nice Jewish lady, so it seemed like the perfect vehicle. A makeup artist and hairdresser styled me after a reproduction of the Warhol. It seemed like a good way to end the series.”

Photograph: Courtesy the artist/Paul Kasmin Gallery

“In 2009, I painted OY, which was a direct response to Ed Ruscha’s painting, OOF. The following year, I made YO after Picasso’s 1901 self-portrait, Yo Picasso. So in 2011, I followed up with a sculptural edition that could be read as oy or yo, depending on which way you look at it. Same for the eight-foot-tall version at Brooklyn Bridge Park overlooking the river: From Manhattan it reads as YO, while from Brooklyn it looks like OY.”

Photograph: © Deborah Kass