Eric Dever, Moorland, 2020, oil on canvas, 30 x36 in, The Heckscher Museum of Art

The Heckscher Museum of Art
THE RAINS ARE CHANGING FAST: NEW ACQUISITIONS IN CONTEXT

March 23, 2024 - September 1, 2024

The Rains are Changing Fast highlights artwork recently acquired by The Heckscher Museum of Art alongside a selection of key works long held in the Museum’s collection. For over a century, the Heckscher has been collecting and presenting art that explores the landscapes and social issues of its place and time. This exhibition, which takes its title from a 2021 video by Christine Sciulli, features new and beloved works of art that together reveal the diverse ways in which artists contend with environmental and cultural change. Created over a span of 175 years by 39 artists, the works are united by shared engagements with landscape, allegory, and abstraction. Some, like Richard Mayhew’s Pescadero (2014) or George Inness’s The Pasture, Durham, Connecticut (c. 1879), present luminous, if precarious, visions of the American landscape. Others, including Deborah Buck’s They Had Stars in Their Eyes (2020) and Dorothy Dehner’s Landscape (1976), employ modes of abstraction that speak to issues of gender and materiality. The resulting visual conversations emphasize the Museum’s ongoing commitment to social concerns, environmental issues, and Long Island’s diverse communities.

Eric Dever's mural-size diptych, "October 10th," is on view at the U.S. Embassy residence in Helsinki, Finland, as part of the State Department's Art in Embassies program.

ARTRA VIDEO | 艾瑞克·戴弗：繁花一瞬 | A Private Visit to Berry Campbell Gallery: Eric Dever "To Look at Things in Bloom"

Watch Interview

"Eric Dever: To Look at Things in Bloom" Featured as a Must See on Artforum Artguide
Preview Exhibition

Berry Campbell: Community
August 11 - 14, 2022
Berry Campbell at Ashawagh hall
780 Springs Fireplace Road
 East Hampton, New York 11937

Preview Exhibiton

Chelsea to Springs

Chelsea’s Berry Campbell Gallery takes over Ashawagh Hall in Springs from today through Sunday with a large group exhibition of artists, past and present, with strong East End connections.

The show includes works by Mary Abbott, Alice Baber, Nanette Carter, Dan Christensen, Eric Dever, Elaine de Kooning, Perle Fine, Grace Hartigan, Raymond Hendler, John Opper, Charlotte Park, Betty Parsons, Mike Solomon, Syd Solomon, Hedda Sterne, Susan Vecsey, Lucia Wilcox, Frank Wimberley, and Larry Zox.

Gallery hours are today through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and noon to 6 on Sunday.

Join artist Eric Dever at this Creative Studio for Adults and Teens to create landscapes using mixed media and collage. Artists highlighted will be Peter Campus, Jane Wilson, Jane Freilicher, Fairfield Porter and Robert Dash.

March 5, 2022
1 pm - 3 pm
Register

NATURE INTO ART
With guest artist Eric Dever
Thursday, February 17, 4:00-5:00 PM EST

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Eric Dever
Trout Pond-Summer
Oil on canvas
36 x 48 inches
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Eric Dever: The Warhol Montauk Project
June 8 - August 20, 2021

Online Exhibition

Online Viewing Room

In 2020, Eric Dever was considered to be a project artist at The Andy Warhol Preserve Visual Arts Program in Montauk, New York. The artist created a series of works related to the landscape and the natural world. This opportunity allowed Eric Dever to have a private place to escape the pandemic world. As a result, the artist created this important group of 18 paintings.

Midpoint through the project, Dever turned his attention from Amsterdam Beach to the greater Montauk area. Upon exploration, Dever found a brochure distributed at the Montauk Lighthouse appropriately titled, “The Explorer’s Club,” originally published in the 1950s. Dever learned about the Montauketts, the land, and the people of Eastern Long Island.

In the Warhol Montauk Project series, Eric Dever takes cues from Warhol’s Self-Portrait (1966) pairing primary and secondary colors, as well as employing the use of different shades of the same color on coarse linen and canvas. Dever applies paint on surfaces rubbed into the support, a process known as decalcomania. Decalcomania was explored by the surrealists and a hallmark of Dever’s painting process. Coupled with ample unpainted surface or negative space the paintings themselves at times resemble serigraphy.

Light sensitivity, shadow, temperature and sound are experiences the artist explores, palpable in these new paintings. The paintings can be viewed online at Artsy or at Berry Campbell Gallery, New York.

With Eric Dever
May 2, 1 pm - 2:30 pm

Field of Dreams: Objects in Space

Join artist Eric Dever for this Creative Studio for Adults and Teens. This month we will paint outdoors; experience scale and proportion as a means of interpreting the Museum meadow and sculpture exhibition, Field of Dreams.

Everyone will have their own workspace and materials. Materials will be provided.

Preregistration is required. Space is limited.

$35 Non-members | $25 Members

Join Eric Dever live from the Parrish studio in this online workshop for adults and teens.

This month we will create drawings and paintings that explore the dual means of representation and abstraction.

Contact Information:
Cara Conklin-Wingfield
631-283-2118
Children@parrishart.org

Where:
Parrish Art Museum
279 Montauk Hwy
Water Mill

Website:
www.parrishart.org

Continuum
ERIC DEVER | MIKE SOLOMON | SUSAN VECSEY | FRANK WIMBERLEY
October 9 - 12, 2020

The outdoor exhibition on Long Island featured works installed at properties from Hampton Bays to Montauk, with social isolation as just one theme.

No one was supposed to get too close to each other over the weekend during a drive-by exhibition of works by 52 artists on the South Fork of Long Island — a dose of culture amid the sterile isolation imposed by the pandemic. But some people couldn’t help themselves...

There was spontaneous interaction. The artist Bastienne Schmidt, dressed in a bright blue pea coat and red pants, waved to those who checked out her installation of canvas-wrapped posts set six feet apart at the Bridgehampton home she shares with her husband, the photographer Philippe Cheng. Kathryn McGraw Berry, an architect sampling the tour in a champagne-colored Audi, chatted with Eric Dever, who was checking the wind resistance of his 12 paintings mounted on posts at his 18th-century Water Mill home.

Artist's Choice: Interconnected
May 7 - June 7, 2020
View Exhibition

Berry Campbell is pleased to announce Artist’s Choice: Interconnected, an exclusive online exhibition of works from gallery’s inventory chosen by Berry Campbell’s represented contemporary artists. Eric Dever, Judith Godwin, Ken Greenleaf, Jill Nathanson, Ann Purcell, Mike Solomon, Susan Vecsey, James Walsh, Joyce Weinstein, and Frank Wimberley have thoughtfully selected one work from our gallery inventory that they associate with their own creative process and artistic journey. This artist-curated exhibition is an inquiry into the lines of influence and connections within our Berry Campbell artist community. Artist’s Choice: Interconnected launches digitally May 7, 2020.

The choices are sometimes expected, and at other times, surprising.  Some artists were inspired by a painting from an artist they had never met, and others paid tribute to old friends or mentors.  Judith Godwin recalls good times with her old friend and art dealer, Betty Parsons.  James Walsh remembers a painting by Walter Darby Bannard from a 1981 show at Knoedler Gallery.  Mike Solomon pays homage to the perseverance of abstract painter and dear friend, Frank Wimberley saying: “The quiet intermingling of his experience, with the purity of painting, gives his abstractions an authenticity and delicacy that is profound to witness.”  Ken Greenleaf favorite is Cloistered #5 (1968) by Ida Kohlmeyer, delighting in the pure abstraction.  Jill Nathanson picked a color-field forerunner, Dan Christensen.  Ann Purcell admitted to being picky but found true inspiration after visiting our Yvonne Thomas show repeatedly.  Eric Dever ruminates about Charlotte Park: “Like a favorite poem, novel or even film, a painting can be a touchstone, something one returns to with certain regularity; perhaps a gauge of some kind, beginning with personal happiness on the occasion of discovery and new revelation as our lives unfold.”  Joyce Weinstein finds parallels with John Opper.  Susan Vecsey loves the “stillness and movement” of Elaine de Kooning’s Six Horses, Blue Wall (1987).  No coincidence that Vecsey lives down the road from the Elaine de Kooning house in the Hamptons. Frank Wimberley recalls of Herman Cherry: “He was one of the East End artists who wished to me to succeed.”

ABOUT BERRY CAMPBELL
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 developed a strong emphasis on research and networking with artists and scholars during their art world years. 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 and Judith Godwin, 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, Yvonne Thomas, 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); and 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 Arts 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.

In this video, Eric Dever is interviewed by Patrick Christiano.

“If you have a minute, can I read you a poem quickly?”

With ample encouragement, artist Eric Dever clears his throat and begins. “Forever – is composed of Nows – / ‘Tis not a different time,” he recites. “Except for Infiniteness – / And Latitude of Home.”

He continues, the last two verses of the celebrated Emily Dickinson poem haunting as ever as they teach a crucial lesson: Every moment that has ever existed was, is or will be a present moment, a “now,” and the infinite is composed of them.
And forever stops for no one. It is with Dickinson’s words in mind that, last year, Dever began a new series of work. Each painting would be inspired by sequential lines of “Forever – Is Composed of Nows –,” the next canvas evolving from the previous.

And not long after he started, Dever cast the idea aside, out of sheer frustration — until recently. “Not too long ago, I realized the way to approach it is not to try to illustrate the poem, but to just select certain paintings and put them together, and that could very much hold the idea,” he said. “For me, I think an artist’s entire oeuvre, if we look at it, it really is a collection of ‘nows,’ and it’s not just ‘nows’ that are in the past. When I engage with my work over time, it’s almost as if that time or that place was in crystal. It’s very clear, the whole thing.”

Dever’s newest body of work, “A Thousand Nows” — on view at The Lyceum Gallery on Suffolk County Community College’s Eastern Campus in Riverhead — is a study in compressed time, the 22 exuberant oils layered with colors that span the artist’s lifetime, from his earliest memories growing up in California.

Exhibition invitation for Inspired, curated by Kimberley Goff of the Elaine Benson Gallery. Exhibition is at Center for Jewish Life in Sag Harbor, NY.

Juried by Phyllis Tuchman

September 20 - October 19, 2019

Opening Reception
September 20, 2019
6-9 pm

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Founded by the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid, geometry is the area of mathematics concerned with the study of space and the relationships between points, lines, curves, and surfaces. In the arts it has often referred to the form and position of parts and shapes, as well as the relationship between those parts and shapes. The connection between are as deep as they are wide. Employing rulers and compasses, Islamic art utilized geometry to create elaborate tessellated expanses, while painters in the Renaissance used geometry to devise evermore realistic perspectives, finding vanishing points and lines of sight. Geometric forms may also be found among textile and folk art around the world. However, it was in the 20th century when geometry came to occupy such a prominent role in art history. Modern painting, from Piet Mondrian, to Bridget Riley and Charlene von Heyl, to name only a few, brought geometry and art into a world of its own. Contemporary artists, in Site:Brooklyn’s Geometry continue and elaborate in this long tradition, using geometric theory, naturally occurring patterns and forms, and other engagements between math and art to explore new syntheses between realism, figuration, abstraction, and pattern making. These works include painting, sculpture, drawing, multimedia, and video.

Frank Wimberley is not one for procrastination.

Historically, the Sag Harbor-based painter has conceptualized and executed his annual creation for the East End Hospice “Box Art Auction” months ahead of schedule.

Until this year, that is.

For the first time in nearly two decades, the artist was feeling the pressure, considering people are still talking about last summer’s auction — an event he has never missed in its 18 years, and a night he will never forget.

“You know what happened last year, right?” Mr. Wimberley asked with a goodhearted laugh. “I got a bid of the highest it has ever been — a bid of $10,000! I thought it was absolutely amazing. Everybody cheered and jumped up and down. We still can’t get over it. I was at the Parrish Art Museum the other day and they say, ‘You’re the guy!’ It’s nice when somebody remembers you! Everybody likes to be remembered.”

The 92-year-old artist was feeling optimistic ahead of this year’s 19th annual auction on Saturday, August 24, at St. Luke’s Church in East Hampton, where bidders flock to see the collection of small, unadorned boxes transformed into one-of-a-kind creations by some 90 East End artists.

47th Kips Bay Decorator Showhouse
May 2nd - May 30th
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Berry Campbell collaborated with Robert Passal Interior Design and Daniel Kahan of Smith and Moore Architects as well as Sarah Bartholomew Design in the Kips Bay Decorator Showhouse, supplying works by Eric Dever, Perle Fine, and Stephen Pace.

Each year, celebrated interior designers transform a magnificent estate into an elegant exhibition of fine furnishings, art and technology. This all began in 1973 when several dedicated supporters of Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club launched the Kips Bay Decorator Show House in Manhattan to raise critical funds for much needed after school and enrichment programs for New York City children. For more than four decades, the show house has been a must-see event for thousands of design enthusiasts, renowned for sparking interior design trends throughout the world. In 2017, the show house expanded with a second location in Palm Beach, in partnership with Boys & Girls Clubs of Palm Beach County.

Eric Dever's paintings sent me to reread a sestina by Fairfield Porter that opens, "No color isolates itself like blue. / If the lamp's blue shadow equals the yellow / Shadow of the sky, in what way is one / Different from the other? Was he on the verge of a discovery / When he fell into a tulip's bottomless red? / Who is the mysterious and difficult adversary?"

Who indeed. Color theory can be taught. Color phenomenology has to be submitted to as if it were a cruel and mute master. Dever, for four years in the 2000s, restricted his palette entirely to Titanium and Zinc White. That is how the current works at Berry Campbell come into being with such rightness, though his palette since then has burst open like spring.

July 16, Lavender Pilgrimmage (2018) may be the first predominately purple abstract painting I've ever seen that didn't succumb to the hue's clownishness. He accomplished this by adding various whites, including that of the canvas. Much else is at that level or better, including sonorous intonations like April 1st, Hellebores I (2018). May the discovery never end.

Interesting. Unusual. Uniquely NYC. Highlights of this week’s top events include “The Art of Fashion,” “Eric Dever: Painting in a House Made of Air,” “Race, Sex & Cinema: The World of Marlon Riggs,” and more. Get the NYC-ARTS Top Five in your inbox every Friday and follow @NYCARTS on Twitter to stay abreast of events as they happen.

Click here for more information.

Click here to Experience Eric Dever: Painting in a House Made of Air as a VR walking tour thanks to Eazel!

Eric Dever (MA ’88) is a painter who graduated from NYU Steinhardt’s studio art program.

His paintings are part of notable public collections at the Parrish Art Museum, Grey Art Gallery-New York University Art Collection, Guild Hall, East Hampton, New York, and Centre d’Art et de Culture, Saint Just de Bellengard, France. He was in the permanent collection exhibition, Parrish Perspectives: Art in Context at the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York, and on display at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York. Current exhibitions include the U.S. Consulate General Hong Kong, and Macau, Art in Embassies, Department of State exhibition.

Eric Dever: Painting in a House Made of Air is on view this month at Berry Campbell Gallery in New York City. The exhibit features a new body of brilliantly hued, large-scale paintings, which emerged when Dever was planting a garden at his Water Mill, New York, studio.

We spoke to him about his artistic process.

You paint in New York City and the East End of Long Island.  How do these locales influence your work?

My painting during graduate school, 1986-88, was influenced by urban landscape and physical forms of civilization. New to town from Los Angeles, I spent a lot of time in museums and was fascinated walking around the city and boroughs. My paintings were often elegiac; the AIDS crisis concerned everyone. The city was very exciting, one had the sense that anything could happen, and each day held life changing possibilities.

Since 2003, I have worked on the East End of Long Island. It is always exciting to move to a new place and my paintings reflected this change. I began with sampled color from a new landscape, but soon moved towards a more personal experience which space and contemplation seemed to permit.

Working with just white paint for four years gave me a heightened awareness of my material. Canvas, linen, paint media—painting itself became the subject of my work. The addition of black and red corresponded over time with an increasing awareness of the subtle qualities of ‘Clarity, Passion and Dark Inertia’ (exhibition NYU Kimmel Galleries, 2015), or the 3 gunas, a key aspect of yogic studies, and a means of interpreting nature itself.

Eric Dever’s recent paintings literally take over Berry Campbell’s Chelsea space. They hang prolifically and fervently on the white walls, bringing the intense hues of spring and summer into the rooms and warming a cold and wind-blown morning.

The show, titled “Painting in a House Made of Air,” comes alive with the artist’s unabashed use of saturated, matte, electric, and often acid color. The paintings offer scattered references to Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and even Andy Warhol.

The works on view build on a transformation of the artist’s practice noted in The Star in April of 2017. Before a major illness, Mr. Dever had painted the same way for more than 10 years, choosing a limited square format and a palette consisting of white, black, and red in different combinations at different intervals.

We are preparing for our Eric Dever exhibition, opening on November 15, 2018. Please read our online catalogue to learn more about the artist and his career.

Eric Dever: Painting in a House Made of Air
January 10 - February 9, 2019

Opening Reception
January 10, 2019
6-8 PM

Photo credit Pam Abrahams, Friends of Guild Hall.

Eric Dever | Solo Exhibition
Berry Campbell Gallery
January, 2019

Open Studio for Adults: All About Color
Saturday, August 4, 2018 - 1:00pm to 3:00pm
Free with Museum Admission
Advance registration is required.

In these free monthly studio sessions, explore painting and mixed-media with guidance from painter Eric Dever. In this session, explore a personal palette within the color spectrum.

Please register online or call 631-283-2118 x130.

The William H. Hannon Library, and Master of Arts in Yoga Studies at Loyola Marymount University, are pleased to present, Eric Dever: Light, Energy and Matter, an exhibition of 45 paintings which brings the viewer on a journey, similar to the path of the artist himself.

For more than a decade, Eric Dever employed the same idiom in his painting, with a square canvas and a limited palette. It served him well, with many group and solo exhibitions both locally and internationally.

The United States Consulate in Hong Kong is currently exhibiting two paintings by Eric Dever, who has a house in Bridgehampton. “NSIBTW-40” is an oil on canvas measuring 72 inches square; “NSIBTW-22” is an oil on linen of the same dimensions. 

Bridgehampton artist Eric Dever's painting NSIBTW 50 was acquired for the Parrish Art Museum's permanent collection. He is represented by Berry Campbell gallery in New York.

Eric Dever’s work is black and white and red all over. He began using the limited color palette 10 years ago this month as a way to create subjective designs that echo hues from the environment. Before summer ends, people can experience his work at exhibits in New York City and the Hamptons. I caught up with Dever at his studio in Water Mill to find out more about his upcoming projects, what inspires his creativity and the meaning behind his abstractions.

Christine Berry, Eric Dever, and Martha Campbell attend Guild Hall's Academy of the Arts Lifetime Achievement Awards Dinner in NYC

Eric Dever: The Rose Chapel at Molloy College featured on Art & Education

November 6–December 20, 2014

Spoken Word

ROCKVILLE CENTRE “Eric Dever: The Rose Chapel,” an exhibition of paintings at the Frank and Gertrude Kaiser Art Gallery, Molloy College, 1000 Hempstead Avenue, Nov. 6 through Dec. 20. 516-323-3196; molloy.edu/artgallery. Credit Courtesy Berry Campbell Gallery 

Eric Dever's paintings are in the new James Brown biopic produced by Mick Jagger for Universal Pictures. The movie opens on Friday, August 8 2014.  Stop by the gallery to see his paintings in person.   

An exhibition of paintings by Eric Dever, who lives and works in Water Mill, will open today at the Berry Campbell Gallery in Chelsea and run through Aug. 9. Mr. Dever has pursued intensely focused investigations into the methods and materials of painting for more than a decade. In the past his compositions were largely geometric, including concentric circles graded from dark to light and variations on the grid. His most recent work has broadened into free shapes and tactile surfaces, the starting point for which was a rose in his garden that he deconstructed.

Ordinarily, as she will tell you, Janet Goleas, the curator of the exhibition “Redacted” at the Islip Art Museum, is not much of a political animal.

But around the time WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, burst into the news a few years ago, “I started thinking of government documents, and eventually of redacted documents,” Ms. Goleas said recently. “It seemed I started seeing them everywhere,” as stories about classified material kept cropping up.

An artist and blogger as well as a curator, she began pondering the many meanings and functions of concealment and redaction, which by one perhaps antiquated definition simply means adapting or editing for publication....

Another artist, Eric Dever, of Water Mill, is showing a series of eight paintings whose color he has limited to variations on red, white and black — in effect, editing out all other colors in his exercise in artistic redaction.

Islip Art Museum is pleased to present REDACTED, a group exhibition curated by Janet Goleas, featuring selected paintings, drawings, sculpture, collage and assemblage by artists Josh Blackwell, Sharon Butler, Jonathan Callan, Eric Dever, Stacy Fisher, Brian Gaman, Jim Lee, Lauren Luloff, Stefana McClure, Linda Miller, Bonnie Rychlak, Mathias Schmeid, Tim Spelios, Ryan Steadman, Ryan Wallace, Ross Watts and Letha Wilson.