Ellsworth Ausby · Peter Busa · FUTURA2000 · Pete Jennerjahn · Ibram Lassaw · Pat Lipsky · Sana Musasama · Keiko Narahashi · Joe Overstreet · Pat Passlof · Jeanne Reynal · Thomas Sills · Paul Waters · Lucia Wilcox · Nina Yankowitz
Eric Firestone Gallery is pleased to announce a new installation: “The Salon” at The Garage. The Garage is the gallery’s sweeping 7,000 square foot warehouse space at 62 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY. The 2023 summer season has initiated a new concept at this location: an ongoing dialogue of cross generational curation rotating through the summer. The installation is conceived as a “salon,” combining historic material represented by the gallery, and younger generations of contemporary artists.
The open warehouse space has been recently renovated with specially designed large moveable walls to create exciting exhibition possibilities. The gallery hopes that the Salon installation will encourage viewers to spend extended time looking. The installations visually showcase and highlight the gallery’s mission: an ongoing reevaluation of the art historical canon, and its legacy and influence on younger artists.
The dramatic installation includes monumental abstract paintings from the 1950s alongside work completed as recently as this past year. Also in the mix are sculptural works including an 8 foot tall mosaic totem by Jeanne Reynal, a welded metal sculpture—like a painting in space—by Ibram Lassaw, a group of colorful glazed ceramic forms by Keiko Narahashi, and monumental ceramic sculpture by Sana Musasama.
A range of surfaces, textures, shapes, and scales are also present in the work on view. A rust orange canvas by Pat Lipsky (Turning 1, 1968) depicts wave forms informed by her experimentation with plotting logarithmic progressions. On view are a group of gentle stripe paintings by Pete Jennerjahn, a Black Mountain College faculty member who worked closely with color theorist Josef Albers. These clean repetitions are juxtaposed with a free-form work by Joe Overstreet: a diamond-shaped canvas stretched loosely over wood dowels with poured and collaged paint. Technical experimentations of all forms are present. An unstretched, raw linen work from Nina Yankowitz’s Dilated Grain Reading series (1973) reflects the artist’s synthesis of sound and color—patterns of paint squeezed directly from plastic bottles reflecting notated musical scores.
The July installation represents an aesthetic conversation across time. Abstract Expressionist painter Pat Passlof is represented by a 1959 canvas as well as a dozen works on paper from the early 2000s. A 2023 ceramic sculpture by Sana Musasama responds to a series that she originally completed in the 1980s. A 2022 large-scale abstract painting by FUTURA2000 includes motifs like his atom-shape and ladder that recur over decades.
