黑料不打烊

Eric Firestone Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Montauk Highway III: Postwar Abstraction in the Hamptons, opening August 17th, and on view through September 29, 2019. 

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Hamptons became one of the most significant meeting grounds of like-minded artists, who gathered on the beach, in local bars, and at one another鈥檚 homes and studios.  It was an extension of the vanguard artistic activity happening in New York City around abstraction, which constituted a radical redefinition of art.  But the East End was also a place where artists were freer to experiment. For the third time, Eric Firestone Gallery pays homage to this rich and layered history in Montauk Highway III.

The show includes work from the period by more than thirty artists who played an important role in the Hamptons scene, and had studios in the area. In this moment, when Ninth Street Women is one of the most talked-about books in the art world, Eric Firestone Gallery continues to re-investigate the depth of this scene and the role of women artists and lesser-known abstractionists.

Uncluttered sight lines and expansive fields by the sea define the landscape of the East End. In the 1950s and 60s, when the artists lived mostly amidst farmers and fishermen, it was particularly so. The influence of this landscape and its light permeates the painting and sculpture on view.

Much of the painting and sculpture presented here has a sense of hope and expansiveness, but is also fractured and elegiac. This aesthetic also becomes a visual metaphor for what the East End represented to these artists.  It was a refuge from the pressures of the city. It was bucolic but punctuated by serious challenge and tragedy: alcoholism, suicide, the heavy shadow of the second World War, and Jackson Pollock鈥檚 death in a car crash in Springs during the summer of 1956.