Eric Dever (born 1962) is an American painter. His paintings are held in the collections of Grey Art Gallery New York University, the Parrish Art Museum, Guild Hall Museum, and the Heckscher Museum of Art. Dever has exhibited throughout the United States since the early 1990s, including exhibitions in France, Hong Kong and Helsinki. [1]
Dever was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. He studied at the Otis College of Art and Design on a pre college full scholarship and received his Bachelor of Arts degree from California Lutheran University in 1984. [2] Two years later, he moved to the East Coast to study painting at New York University, Steinhardt School, where he received his Master of Arts degree in 1988. [3] [4] Painter Marcia Hafif was among the faculty at the NYU Steinhart School, and offered students a visit to her studio, where she was grinding pigments as part of her on going examination of paint media, which had a powerful and lasting influence on Dever’s own work. [5]
Beginning in 1988, Dever worked part time in the architectural firm of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners in New York, while continuing to exhibit his paintings. In 2002 Dever moved to the East End of Long Island, [6] where he embarked on a decade long process, working for 4 years with white paint alone, examining the material properties of oil paint and support. It wasn’t until he had introduced black that he realized he was working with light itself. In 2010, Dever began testing a variety of prepared red hues and selected Naphthol Scarlet, closest in hue to Vermillion, a color 9th century alchemists formulated with sulfur and mercury. Dever’s sudden experience of color was very exciting as the possibilities grew larger and more complex. He began to develop a sense of mixing qualities of light, energy and matter, as one might mix color or hue. The dark hued paintings feel heavy or dense, and those mixed with red appear explosive, others very light, while each painting remains related and part of a whole. Dever’s examination of color phenomena also echo his studies of material nature, as presented in Samkhya philosophy, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita (14.5.) [7]
At Guild Hall in East Hampton, New York, Dever’s 5 x 10 foot cloud inspired painting was placed on stage for Joseph Pintauro’s play, Cloud Life, as part of “The Painting Plays” in 2012. [8] This collaboration, “... Pintauro admires for what he sees as its struggle between Dever’s signature reductive color minimalism and the artist’s morphing into representation...” [9]
In 2014 Berry Campbell exhibited a selection of Dever’s paintings, his first exhibition with the gallery. [10] Two paintings travelled to the US Consulate General of Hong Kong and Macau for an Art in Embassies, Department of State exhibition, 2016-19. A rose from Dever’s garden was the starting point for this group of paintings, which he deconstructed with line and form, revealing the energetic qualities of color. [11]
Dever’s second exhibition with Berry Campbell, “Painting in a House Made of Air,” filled the New York gallery with the artist’s bold use of saturated, electric and sometimes acid color, offering references to Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and Andy Warhol. The paintings build on Dever’s transformation as noted in The East Hampton Star in April 2017, for more than 10 years he had limited his palette to white, black, and red. Dever’s painting now draws inspiration from his garden and the full color spectrum in a new body of work. [12] [13]
An early pandemic studio view in 2020 reveals paintings and a closer look at the unfolding spring palette, informed by walks and the overhead blossoming tree canopy. The resulting paintings often appear weightless as forms dematerialize, reversing figure and ground. [14] Dever was invited to present 12 related paintings mounted on posts in his front yard, featured in The New York Times, for an outdoor “Drive-By” exhibition, which included 52 artists on properties spanning Hampton Bays to Montauk on the South Fork of Eastern Long Island, New York. Social isolation was one theme, while providing a cultural activity during the isolation of the pandemic. [15]
By the end of 2020, Dever had completed an Andy Warhol Foundation/Nature Conservancy-Montauk Project Artist residency. The Warhol Reserve is located at the eastern most tip of Long Island. His paintings from this project highlight the palette of seasonal blue northeastern summer hues. Midpoint through the project, he began exploring adjacent Montauket ancestral lands and vistas. Taking cues from Andy Warhol’s self portrait, pairing complementary or opposite colors, he reimagines a view of Scallop Pond and Paumonok Path, the path itself dedicated to Montauket King, Stephen Talkhouse Pharoah. [16]
Berry Campbell presented in 2022 its third exhibition of paintings by Eric Dever which featured 19 recent paintings created in the artist’s Southampton, New York, studio. The name Dever chose for this body of work, To Look at Things in Bloom, is adapted from a line of verse in the Loveliest of Trees by the English classical scholar and poet, A. E. Housman (1859-1936). These paintings continue the artist’s exploration of nature, inspired by his surroundings from his childhood in Los Angeles to his present-day home in Eastern Long Island. [17] In the exhibition catalogue essay, Gail Levin writes:
“Not surprisingly, Dever’s new pictures do not seek to replicate nature, but instead vibrate between representation and abstraction, a kind of rhythmic dance expressing both what he later recalls in his mind’s eye and, simultaneously, how exhilarated he feels while he loses himself in nature...
Dever doesn’t paint nature, he paints his experience of it. His personal expression calls to mind an earlier painter who also migrated from Los Angeles to New York City to study painting, then moved out to the Hamptons on Long Island’s East End: Jackson Pollock, who famously responded to Hans Hofmann’s question, 'Do you work from nature?' by proclaiming: 'I am nature.' As it did for Pollock, the natural landscape on Long Island offers Dever both stimulation and direction that has found its way into his paintings.
In Dever's Southampton studio, set in the picturesque garden that he himself designed, I looked at the gorgeous diptych Lily of the Nile (also called Agapanthus and featured in another of the new works), and I found myself recalling the garden of Claude Monet (1840-1926), in Giverny, France, which inspired the late paintings of waterlilies that famously disregarded boundaries and moved toward abstraction. Critics have long since linked Monet’s late 'all-over painting' to Pollock’s abstractions. Now Dever’s over-sized depiction of the lavender blue agapanthus, this time extending over two large canvases, continues in this gestural tradition..." [18]
Dever was the 2021/2022 Artist in Residence at the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York. In 2022, his painting, October 10th , was chosen by the Art in Embassies Program for the United States Embassy Residence in Helsinki, Finland. Sampled colorful morning glory blossoms form the scaffolding of this painting and echo Dever’s self identification with nature. The blossoms themselves reflect the distance and collection of pollen by bees within a 3.6 mile radius of his Water Mill studio garden, where hives are tended on site. Dever’s oeuvre embraces a history of shared growth between the artist, his garden and painting itself. [19] In January 2022, he gave a lecture, Nature into Art, at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, East Hampton, New York. Recently the Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, New York, acquired a painting for its permanent collection. [20]
2024 Seeing Red: From Renoir to Warhol, Nassau County Museum of Art. Roslyn Harbor, New York (2024-25) [30]
The Rains are Changing Fast: New Acquisitions in Context. The Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, New York [31]
2023 U.S. Embassy residence in Helsinki, Finland. Art in Embassies, Department of State (2023-24) [32]
2022 A Visual Conversation (artist resident project and student collaboration), Parrish Art Museum. Water Mill, New York [33]
2020 Drive-By-Art, Public Art in the Moment of Social Distancing. South Fork, Long Island, New York [34]
2017 Parrish Perspectives: New Works in Context. Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York [35]
Debt Fair, Occupy Museums, Whitney Biennial. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York [36]
2016 U.S. Consulate General Hong Kong and Macau. Art in Embassies, Department of State (2016–19) [37]
2014 Redacted: Connecting Dots Through a Shifting Field. Islip Art Museum, East Islip, New York [38]
2011 Doucement. ParisCONCRET, Paris, France [39]
Deborah Kass is an American artist whose work explores the intersection of pop culture, art history, and the construction of self. Deborah Kass works in mixed media, and is most recognized for her paintings, prints, photography, sculptures and neon lighting installations. 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. 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.
Gladys M. Nilsson is an American artist, and one of the original Hairy Who Chicago Imagists, a group of representational artists active during the 1960s and 1970s. She is married to fellow-artist and Hairy Who member Jim Nutt.
The Parrish Art Museum is an art museum designed by Herzog & de Meuron Architects and located in Water Mill, New York, whereto it moved in 2012 from Southampton Village. The museum focuses extensively on work by artists from the artist colony of the South Shore and North Shore.
Balcomb Greene (1904–1990) was an American artist and teacher. He and his wife, artist Gertrude Glass Greene, were heavily involved in political activism to promote mainstream acceptance of abstract art and were founding members of the American Abstract Artists organization. His early style was completely non-objective. Juan Gris and Piet Mondrian as well as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse influenced his early style. From the 1940s his work "opened out to the light and space of natural form." He painted landscapes and figure. "He discerned the pain of a man, and hewed to it integrally from beginning to end…. In his study of the figure he did not stress anatomical shape but rather its intuitive, often conflicting spirit."
John Torreano is an American artist from Michigan. He is currently clinical professor of studio art at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University. Torreano is known for utilizing faceted gems in a variety of mediums in order to create "movement oriented perception" in his works. Artist Richard Artschwager described Torreano's works as "paintings that stand still and make you move."
Perle Fine (1905–1988) was an American Abstract expressionist painter. Fine's work was most known by its combination of fluid and brushy rendering of the materials and the use of biomorphic forms encased and intertwined with irregular geometric shapes.
William Quigley is an American painter from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Hiroyuki Hamada is a Japanese born sculptor based in the United States.
Analia Saban is a contemporary conceptual artist who was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, but is currently living in Los Angeles, California, United States. Her work takes traditional artistic media such as drawing, painting and sculpture and pushes their limits as a scientific experimentation with art making. Because of her pushing the limits with different forms of art, Saban has taken the line that separated the different art forms and merged them together.
Elizabeth Osborne is an American painter who lives and works in Philadelphia. Working primarily in oil paint and watercolor, her paintings are known to bridge ideas about formalist concerns, particularly luminosity with her explorations of nature, atmosphere and vistas. Beginning with figurative paintings in the 1960s and '70s, she moved on to bold, color drenched, landscapes and eventually abstractions that explore color spectrums. Her experimental assemblage paintings that incorporated objects began an inquiry into psychological content that she continued in a series of self-portraits and a long-running series of solitary female nudes and portraits. Osborne's later abstract paintings present a culmination of ideas—distilling her study of luminosity, the landscape, and light.
Donald Martiny is an American artist. His abstract paintings are related to both action painting and Abstract expressionism.
Sam McKinniss is an American abstract and figurative postmodern painter based in Brooklyn.
Charlotte Park, also known as Charlotte Park Brooks (1918–2010) was an American abstract painter. She began work as a professional artist soon after the close of World War II, working in studios first in Manhattan and then in eastern Long Island. She was associated with and drew both support and inspiration from her husband James Brooks and other first-generation abstract expressionist artists, including particularly her neighbors, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner. During most of her career she neither sought nor received praise from critics and collectors, but late in life was celebrated for the quality of her artistic achievements and had her work shown in prestigious solo and group exhibitions. At the end of her life a critic said, "Hers was a major gift all but stifled by a happily embraced domesticity and by the critical bullying of a brutally doctrinaire art world."
Marina Savashynskaya Dunbar is a Belarusian artist and entrepreneur. She is known for her modern, abstract paintings. Her artwork has been featured in museums and galleries throughout the United States as well as national and international private and public collections. She studied business and fine art in college and she is currently based in Charleston, South Carolina.
Berry Campbell Gallery is an art gallery in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City. Its founders and directors are Christine Berry and Martha Campbell. The gallery focuses on historical and contemporary artists associated with American modernism.
Margaret Garrett, is an American artist and dancer. Her artistic practice includes painting, printmaking, collage, and video work. She lives and maintains a studio in Shelter Island, New York with her husband, the composer and pianist Bruce Wolosoff. She has two daughters, the singer-songwriter Juliet Garrett and the sculptor and mixed media artist Katya Wolosoff.
Frank Wimberley is an African American abstract expressionist artist.
Jill Nathanson is an American visual artist and educator. She is associated with color field painting. Nathanson lives in New York City
Laurie Lambrecht is an American artist working primarily in photography and fiber. Beyond her own work, she is known for her photographs of Roy Lichtenstein, for whom she was an assistant in the early 1990s.
Claude Lawrence is an American jazz tenor saxophonist and self-taught abstract artist. Beginning in the 1960s he had a successful career as a jazz musician before switching his focus to painting full-time in the 1980s. His art is held in the permanent collections of more than twenty museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Parrish Art Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)