Kass's early work mimics and reworks signature styles of iconic male artists of the 20th century including Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, and Ed Ruscha.
[2] Kass's technique of appropriation is a critical commentary on the intersection of social power relations, identity politics, and the historically dominant position of male artists in the art world.
[4] At age 14, Kass began taking drawing classes at The Art Students League in New York City which she funded with money she made babysitting.
During her high school years, she would take her time in the city to visit the Museum of Modern Art, where she would be exposed to the works of post-war artists like Frank Stella and Willem de Kooning.
[4] At age 17, Stella’s retrospective exhibition inspired Kass to become an artist as she observed and understood the logic in his progression of works and the motivation behind his creative decisions.
[4] At the same time Neo-Expressionism was being helmed by white men in the late Reagan years, women were just beginning to create a stake in the game for critical works.
Kass felt that content of these works connected those of the post-war abstract painters of the mid-70s including Elizabeth Murray, Pat Steir, and Susan Rothenberg.
[4] Reading texts on subjectivity, objectivity, specificity, and gender fluidity by theorists like Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Kass became literate in ideas surrounding identity.
[7] In 2012 Kass's work was the subject of a mid-career retrospective Deborah Kass, Before and Happily Ever After at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, PA.[3][8] An accompanying catalogue published by Skira Rizzoli, included essays by noted art historians Griselda Pollock, Irving Sandler, Robert Storr, Eric C. Shiner and writers and filmmakers Lisa Leibmann, Brooks Adams, and John Waters.
Before and Happily Ever After, for example, coupled Andy Warhol’s painting of an advertisement for a nose job with a movie still of Cinderella fitting her foot into her glass slipper, touching on notions of Americanism and identity in popular culture.
These works combine stylistic devices from a wide variety of post-war painting, including Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, and Ed Ruscha, along with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, Laura Nyro, and Sylvester, among others, pulling from popular music, Broadway show tunes, the Great American Songbook, Yiddish, and film.
The paintings view American art and culture of the last century through the lens of that time period's outpouring of creativity that was the result of post-war optimism, a burgeoning middle class, and democratic values.
[18] On December 9, 2015 Deborah Kass introduced her new paintings that incorporated neon lights in an exhibition at Paul Kasmin Gallery entitled "No Kidding" in Chelsea, New York.
[23] The neon installation reads “A woman has no place in the art world unless she proves over and over again that she won’t be eliminated.” Kass changed the quote slightly to better represent her beliefs but it was derived from Bourgeois.
[27] 2012: Shiner, Eric C., with Lisa Liebman, Brooks Adams, Griselda Pollock, Irving Sandler, Robert Storr and John Waters, 'Deborah Kass: Before and Happily Ever After,' Rizzoli, New York.
[29] 2010: Katz, Jonathan D. and David C. Ward, eds., HIDE/ SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, exhibition catalog, Smithsonian Books, Washington DC 2006: Wagner, Frank, Kasper Konig, Julia Freidrich, eds., The Eighth Square, Gender, Life, and Desire in the Arts since 1960, exhibition catalog, Museum Ludwig, Hatje Cantz Verlag, Germany 2006: Bloom, Lisa, Jewish Identities in American Feminist Art, Routledge, New York, NY [30] 2004: Higgs, Matthew, Likeness: Portraits of Artists by Other Artists, exhibition catalogue, CAA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art and Independent Curators International, San Francisco, CA 1999: Plante, Michael, ed.
(with essays by Maurice Berger, Linda Nochlin, Robert Rosenblum, and Mary Anne Staniszewski), Deborah Kass: The Warhol Project, exhibition catalog, Newcombe Art Gallery, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 1998: Bright, Deborah, ed., The Passionate Camera, Photography and Bodies of Desire, Routledge, New York, NY 1997: Schor, Mira, Wet, On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture, Duke University Press, Durham, NC 1996: Kleeblatt, Norman L and Linda Nochlin, Too Jewish?