PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

BERRY CAMPBELL GALLERY HOSTS EXHIBITION AT HISTORIC ASHAWAGH HALL

NEW YORK, NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 29, 2020 – Berry Campbell Gallery is pleased to present “Continuum,” a special exhibition at the historic Ashawagh Hall in Springs, East Hampton, New York. “Continuum” is a group exhibition featuring works by local contemporary artists represented by Berry Campbell: Eric Dever, Mike Solomon, Susan Vecsey, and Frank Wimberley. 

Ashawagh Hall is located at 780 Springs Fireplace Road in Springs, East Hampton, just a few steps from Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner’s former home (now the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center).  Springs is known as a long-standing artist community, considered an artistic center for Abstract Expressionist artists like Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, James Brooks, Charlotte Park, Perle Fine, Willem de Kooning, Elaine de Kooning, and Ibram Lassaw.

Berry Campbell represents many artists connected to the Hamptons community including Perle Fine, Charlotte Park, Raymond Hendler, John Opper, Syd Solomon, Larry Zox, and Dan Christensen.  Started in the 1960s by the Abstract Expressionists, the “Springs Invitational” exhibition, hosted by Ashawagh Hall, is hailed as a cornerstone event of the local community.  To further this tradition, Berry Campbell is featuring four of the gallery’s contemporary artists who continue this legacy by exhibiting at this historic venue.

“Continuum” will be on view from Friday, October 9, 2020 through Monday, October 12, 2020 for Columbus Day weekend.  Ashawagh Hall will be open with special hours:  Friday, 11 am- 6 pm;  Saturday, 9 am – 6 pm (Springs Farmer’s Market until 1pm); Sunday,  11 am – 6 pm; Monday (Columbus Day), 11 am – 6 pm.  Artists in the exhibition will be present each afternoon. For further information, please call 212.924.2178 or email info@berrycampbell.com.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

ERIC DEVER (b. 1962)

Over the last decade, Eric Dever has pursued intensely focused investigations into methods and materials, creating works which gradually have evolved into sensitively executed and intimate works of art. Dever was born in Los Angeles, California and received his Bachelor of Arts degree from California Lutheran University, Thousand Oaks. He moved to the East Coast to study at New York University where he received his Master of Arts.

For more than a decade, Eric Dever purposefully redacted color, using a limited palette: white for four years, white and black for two years, followed by white, black and red. “I found myself taking cues from flowers as they blossomed and color entered my paintings.” However, instead of exploring just one color at a time, Dever embraced the entire spectrum. Initially he used mostly mixed tints, but with this epiphany of color, he began creating new mixed hues.

Eric Dever was recently participated in “Drive-by-Art” (Public Art in This Moment of Social Distancing) curated by Warren Neidich.  Dever and his series of paintings entitled, “Áquas de Marco” (Waters of March), were featured in the New York Times.

MIKE SOLOMON (b. 1956)

Solomon studied at the Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting in Maine (1975) and continued his studies at the Yale Summer School of Music and Art, Norfolk, Connecticut (1978). He spent the rest of 1978 in New York City studying independently with artists Ray Parker and David Budd. In 1979, Solomon earned his Bachelor of Arts at the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he studied with Charles Garabedian and John McCracken. In 1989, Solomon earned his Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College, New York. Additionally, he served as studio assistant to John Chamberlain and Alfonso Ossorio.

Mike Solomon recently participated in the Parrish Art Museum’s “Artist Stories from the Pandemic.”  Solomon’s drawings of African-American first responders were featured in a Brooklyn Rail review of the project. This series of twenty drawings will soon become part of a museum collection.

SUSAN VECSEY (b. 1971)

Susan Vecsey was born in New Jersey and currently lives and works in both New York City and East Hampton, New York.  She earned her Bachelor of Arts from Barnard College, Columbia University, New York and her Master of Fine Arts from the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, studying under Graham Nickson. In 2012, Vecsey was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome. 

Susan Vecsey is currently included in the exhibition “blue.” curated by museum director, Dr. Charles A. Riley II, for the Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn, New York.  This group exhibition includes works by Jeffrey Gibson, Helen Frankenthaler, Sean Scully, and Henri Matisse.  Vecsey’s work will become the museum’s most recent acquisition.

FRANK WIMBERLEY (b. 1926)

Frank Wimberley feels abstract painting is a continuous adventure. Born in 1926, the artist is a well-known presence in the art scene on the East End of Long Island and an important figure in African-American art since the 1960s. Acclaimed for his dynamic, multi-layered, and sophisticated paintings, Wimberley is among the leading contemporary artists to continue in the Abstract Expressionist tradition.

What has always excited him is to take the theme or feeling from the very first stroke he lays down and follow it to its particular conclusion, “very much like creating the controlled accident.” His improvisational method is akin to jazz, an important part of his life and a theme in his art. Despite the spontaneity of his process, Wimberley makes each decision deliberately, respectful of what emerges and where it is going; he enjoys the surprise of arriving at definitions that seem to come to life on their own. Similarly, his works engage the viewer in their strong physicality and unpredictability as well as in their insights into the ways that pictorial experiences are perceived and understood.

The Studio Museum in Harlem recently acquired a work by Frank Wimberley for its permanent collection.

ABOUT BERRY CAMPBELL GALLERY

Christine Berry and Martha Campbell have many parallels in their backgrounds and interests. Both studied art history in college, began their careers in the museum world, and later worked together at a major gallery in midtown Manhattan. Most importantly, however, Berry and Campbell share a curatorial vision.

Both art dealers have developed a strong emphasis on research and networking with artists and scholars. They decided to work together, opening Berry Campbell Gallery in 2013 in the heart of New York's Chelsea art district, at 530 West 24th Street on the ground floor. In 2015, the gallery expanded, doubling its size with an additional 2,000 square feet of exhibition space.

Highlighting a selection of postwar and contemporary artists, the gallery fulfills an important gap in the art world, revealing a depth within American modernism that is just beginning to be understood, encompassing the many artists who were left behind due to race, gender, or geography-beyond such legendary figures as Pollock and de Kooning. Since its inception, the gallery has been especially instrumental in giving women artists long overdue consideration, an effort that museums have only just begun to take up, such as in the 2016 traveling exhibition, Women of Abstract Expressionism, curated by University of Denver professor Gwen F. Chanzit. This show featured work by Perle Fine and Judith Godwin, both represented by Berry Campbell, along with that of Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, and Joan Mitchell. In 2019, Berry Campbell's exhibition, Yvonne Thomas: Windows and Variations (Paintings 1963 - 1965) was reviewed by Roberta Smith for the New York Times, in which Smith wrote that Thomas, "... kept her hand in, adding a fresh directness of touch, and the results give her a place in the still-emerging saga of postwar American abstraction."

In addition to Perle Fine, Judith Godwin, and Yvonne Thomas, artists whose work is represented by the gallery include Edward Avedisian, Walter Darby Bannard, Stanley Boxer, Dan Christensen, Eric Dever, John Goodyear, Ken Greenleaf, Raymond Hendler, Ida Kohlmeyer, Jill Nathanson, John Opper, Stephen Pace, Charlotte Park, William Perehudoff, Ann Purcell, Mike Solomon, Syd Solomon, Albert Stadler, Susan Vecsey, James Walsh, Joyce Weinstein, Frank Wimberley, Larry Zox, and Edward Zutrau. The gallery has helped promote many of these artists' careers in museum shows including that of Bannard at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2018-19); Syd Solomon, in a traveling museum show which culminates at the John and Mable Ringling Museum in Sarasota and has been extended through 2021; Stephen Pace at The McCutchan Art Center/Pace Galleries at the University of Southern Indiana (2018) and at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (2019); Vecsey and Mike Solomon at the Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina (2017 and 2019, respectively); and Eric Dever at the Suffolk Community College, Riverhead, New York (2020). In an April 3, 2020 New York Times review of Berry Campbell's exhibition of Ida Kohlmeyer's Cloistered paintings, Roberta Smith stated: “These paintings stunningly sum up a moment when Minimalism was giving way to or being complicated by something more emotionally challenging and implicitly feminine and feminist. They could hang in any museum.”

Collaboration is an important aspect of the gallery. With the widened inquiries and understandings that have resulted from their ongoing discussions about the art world canon, the dealers feel a continual sense of excitement in the discoveries of artists and research still to be made.

Berry Campbell is located in the heart of the Chelsea Art District at 530 West 24th Street, Ground Floor, New York, NY 10011. For further information, contact us at 212.924.2178, info@berrycampbell.com or www.berrycampbell.com.