Art Basel : Galleries are ‘bringing out the quality’ in the Hamptons this summer (by Julie Baumgardner)
Horses graze among monumental Frank Stella sculptures, a bronze piece by Camille Henrot dangles from a tree, and twenty-five-foot ‘tapestries’ by Futura take over an 7,000-square-foot garage
There are likely two reasons you’ve heard of the Hamptons: monumental beach houses and Jackson Pollock. Or, to be fair, the beach houses with the Pollocks. That’s the fantastic duality of what New Yorkers call ‘Out East’, a natural wonder that has served as an inspired haven for artists as much as a paradise retreat for the well-heeled. It’s also become a rather hospitable place for many tiers and types of galleries. This summer, the Tribeca-cool operations of David Lewis and Canada squeezed into East Hampton’s Newtown Lane, a locus for many blue-chip names, like Van de Weghe and Michael Werner. As with the area’s history, so steeped in world-class artists, this summer galleries have brought out the ‘quality’, everyone's favorite buzzword these days; and so is our duty to share eight of the standouts on view this month.
Shirazeh Houshiary, Forgetting the World, 2020. Copyright Shirazeh Houshiary. Courtesy of Lisson Gallery.
Shirazeh Houshiary
Lisson Gallery, East Hampton
August 18–28
Shirazeh Houshiary’s fourteenth presentation with Lisson Gallery offers an intimate look at her 40-year practice. Though the artist has painted for the entirety of her career, her practice hasn’t wavered much: Houshiary affixes a canvas to the ground and carefully moves herself and material around it. The works in this show, like her canon of painting, are composed of pigment mixed with water dripped across the canvas, which Houshiary then inscribes with words, which are then further manipulated to become one with the surface. Her form of abstraction is experiential, finding home in the history of the Hamptons, alongside artists who worked and lived here, like Pollock, Lee Krasner, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline.
Todd Gray, Atlantic (Octavia), 2022. Courtesy of the artist and David Lewis, New York.
Todd Gray
David Lewis, East Hampton
August 13–28
David Lewis opened a Hamptons outpost this summer in response to his collector base, and the August show is from Todd Gray, whose career began with a photograph of Mick Jagger in Life magazine. Gray went on to be Michael Jackson’s personal photographer, study under Allan Sekula, and create a life and practice in Ghana, a place he first went with Stevie Wonder in the 1990s to shoot an album cover. On that trip, a quip from Wonder (‘This is where we’re from because of the Atlantic Cross’) changed his artistic practice forever. Nowadays Gray uses and layers his archival photographs to explore the Black diasporic psyche, returning to ancestral lands in a way, as he said in a 2021 interview, that ‘is infinite, like looking at the ocean or celestial bodies’.
Frank Stella, The Grand Cascapedia, 2021.
Frank Stella, ‘Outdoor Sculpture’
The Ranch, Montauk
Through December 1
The Ranch is innately tied to the history of Montauk as well as the Hamptons: It was once the longest-running cattle ranch in the U.S., established in 1658, and it’s also just down the road from Eothen – a seafront compound that once belonged to Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey. As of last summer, The Ranch was revamped and became the second act of Max Levai, ex-president of Marlborough Gallery. This year, the space’s summer sally is an outdoor sculpture path of works by Frank Stella, where horses graze amid monumental pieces like Frank's Wooden Star (2014) and Fat 12 Point Carbon Fiber Star (2016). For as Levai stresses, The Ranch is an intentional and reflective space that includes both a farm philosophy and a vigorous art program.
Richard Mayhew, Landscape for Bob, 2013. Courtesy of the artist, ACA Galleries, New York, and the South Etna Montauk Foundation, Montauk.
Richard Mayhew
South Etna Montauk Foundation
August 6 – October 15
Also opened last year, South Etna Montauk Foundation is a pop-up-project-space-turned-permanent-foundation started by artworld tour-de-forces Adam Lindemann and Amalia Dayan, who run Venus Over Manhattan and LGDR, respectively. With South Etna, however, it was specifically the market the duo wanted to eschew; they treat the space as an opportunity to ‘organize shows that are really worth traveling for’, Lindemann has said, and chose Montauk to separate themselves from the commercial hubs of the Hamptons. Independent curator Alison M. Gingeras oversees the program and is closing this season with a show by Richard Mayhew, an Afro-Indigenous nonagenarian painter and founding member of the Spiral collective. Mayhew’s emotive bursts of colorful painting skate between landscape and meditation, or what he calls ‘mindscapes’. Though Mayhew now paints in his Santa Cruz, California, studio, he hails from Long Island and his grandmother was Shinnecock (the Native American tribe local to what are now the Hamptons) – and it’s from this heritage that he upends the traditions of European landscape painting.
Installation view of Stefan Rinck’s exhibition ‘Semigods of the Jockey Club’, 2022, Skarstedt, East Hampton. Photo by John Berens. © Stefan Rinck.
Stefan Rinck, ‘Semigods of the Jockey Club’
Skarstedt, East Hampton
Through September 11
With two years on Newtown Lane under its belt, Skarstedt continues to mount museum-level shows that would be just as at home in its Upper East Side location. The most recently opened exhibition, ‘Semigods of the Jockey Club’, is from Stefan Rinck, whose satirical surrealist-leaning sculptures of stone festoon symbols from sports, gambling, and popular culture into a cast of motley characters. Cousin Itt, Darth Vader, and Pokémon creatures all find their way into Rinck’s polished marble, quartzite, and sandstone, but they’re fashioned to evoke fine carvings from French Romanesque, Pre-Columbian, and African artistic traditions – an atavistic gesture to enervate older aesthetic conventions into contemporary iconography.
Installation view of Camille Henrot's exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Southampton, 2022. Picturing Derelitta, 2016. © ADAGP Camille Henrot. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo by Thomas Barratt.
Camille Henrot
Hauser & Wirth, Southampton
Through September 4
Camille Henrot’s first solo show with Hauser & Wirth spans the entire summer season at the gallery’s Southampton space. The French artist moves fluidly between mediums of film, painting, sculpture, drawing and installation, though this outdoor exhibition focuses specifically on a selection of bronze sculptures from the series ‘System of Attachment’ (2018–2021) and ‘Monday’ (2016–2017). Amorphous yet familiar, these large-scale patinated pieces emerge from Henrot’s belief that sculpture is a supple, even ‘cuddly’ medium, resulting in objects of emotional protection, more than cold consecrations of formalism. With some on the grass, others on plinths, and one even hanging from a tree, Henrot’s sculptures make for a ripe experience of en plein air art-going on hot summer days.
Futura creating his ‘Tarpestries’ onsite at Eric Firestone Gallery's The Garage, East Hampton, 2022. Photo courtesy of Shilei McGurr.
Futura, ‘Tarpestries’
Eric Firestone Gallery and The Garage, East Hampton
August 6 – September 18
Largely considered to be one of the first mid-tier contemporary galleries to set up in the Hamptons (in 2010), Eric Firestone Gallery has just opened its second space out east, known as The Garage. This month, in the exhibition ‘Tarpestries’, the 1970s New York City graffiti legend Futura is debuting a new series of works for which he has flipped the script of the traditional technique of tapestry making by using spray paint on tarps. Three massive sculptures and over 20 new paintings, ranging from seven to 25 feet in length and height, will be showcased across the gallery's flagship East Hampton space and The Garage’s 7,000-square-foot area. For anyone questioning what street art has to do with the Hamptons, remember the gallery has a long tradition of bringing urban cultural expression to the soft streets of Newtown Lane: One of its first shows in 2010 included works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and Zephyr, among many others.
Kiki Smith, Small Wave, 2016. © Kiki Smith. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
Kiki Smith
Pace, East Hampton
August 4–14
For its third season in the Hamptons, Pace has staccatoed its programming into short ten-day sprints. For the dog days of August, a selection of mostly new bronze, aluminum, and silver sculptures by Kiki Smith will take center stage. Though Smith herself is a resident of the other creative enclave in the greater New York area (the Hudson Valley), the themes she often explores – fragility versus heaviness, stability versus ephemerality – are all filtered through the lens of the natural world, tying these works to point of place: the great outdoors. Sense a theme around these parts?
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