BHM: Perlman, ‘Finish & Form’ + Dever, ‘ The Warhol Montauk Project’ / Exhibits Open March 8th

Joel Perlman: Finish and Form
Eric Dever: The Warhol Montauk Project

March 8-April 20, 2025

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The Bridgehampton Museum is delighted to announce our inaugural exhibition of our 2025 calendar year.

We are honored to be presenting “Eric Dever: The Warhol Montauk Paintings & Joel Perlman: Finish and Form”. This exhibition marks the first in the museum’s initiatives focusing on local artists as well as artists that are part of the Museum’s Permanent Collection. This show consists of two artists’ work, however we view it as one show that contrasts the practices of two masters of their chosen mediums. The works not only command the galleries that they occupy but speak to each other between the spaces. We invite you to explore, experience, and be enlightened by the works of two artists that The Bridgehampton Museum is honored to host and consider friends.

The exhibition opens on March 8th and runs through April 20th.

We will host a reception on Saturday March 8, 2025 from 11AM-3PM.

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Joel Perlman, Black Hat II, 2022. Cast Bronze, 20 x 11 x 11 inches.
Courtesy of Loretta Howard Gallery, New York.————

Joel Perlman is best known for his sculptures in welded steel, aluminum and bronze. While creating a five-decade body of work in a uniquely personal style, Perlman obliquely references the welded sculpture of Picasso and Julio Gonzalez; as well as the Futurism, the Bauhaus, and the Russian Constructivism movements. At Cornell, Perlman wishing to weld, was sent to a trade school where his classmates were farmers, bikers, and truck drivers. This began his lifelong interest in machinery, cars, motorcycles, anything that moves fast. The author Phillip Palmedo (Joel Perlman: A Sculptor’s Journey) once described Perlman’s work as “built like a Swiss watch, hits like a Mack truck”.

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Perlman speaks of his work to David Taylor of Dan’s Papers, “I like all types of metal as they each have special properties. For the large pieces, I use mild steel, which has great weight and strength and oxidizes to a rich brown patina. Welding is easy; figuring out what to do is hard. I also use stainless steel for a muted reflective finish or aluminum when there is a weight issue. For indoor sculptures, I created pieces in Styrofoam insulation sheets and then cast them in bronze…. While I like all metal to look like what it is, what David Smith called ‘truth to materials’ patina can enhance the bronze.” (Dan’s Papers, November 3, 2023) 

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Perlman was born in New York City and maintains studios in both Tribeca and Watermill, New York. His studies include Cornell (BFA 1965), University of California, Berkeley (MA 1967), and the Central School of Art and Design, London. Since 1973 he has exhibited consistently at the seminal Andre Emmerich Gallery, Kouros Gallery and most recently Loretta Howard Gallery. He is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. His work is included in many public collections including the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Guild Hall Museum, Parrish Art Museum, Nassau County Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Since 1973, he has taught at The School of Visual Arts.

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Eric Dever, ‘Solar Radiation and the Sky in the Sea, Foreground, 2022’.
Oil on Linen, 30 x 36 inches. Courtesy Berry Campbell Gallery, New York.

In 2020, Eric Dever was invited to be a project artist at The Andy Warhol Preserve administered by the Nature Conservancy in Montauk, New York. Eleven of the original paintings, The Warhol Montauk Project, are currently on display at the Bridgehampton Museum. The artist took cues from the landscape and the natural world, exploring light sensitivity, shadow and temperature, palpable in these new paintings. Dever also found inspiration in Warhol’s Self-Portrait (1966), pairing primary and secondary colors applied onto coarse linen and canvas, a process known as decalcomania. Decalcomania was explored by the Surrealists and are a hallmark of Dever’s painting process. Coupled with ample unpainted surface or negative space the paintings themselves at times resemble serigraphy.

Dever has recently exhibited in the U.S. State Department, Art in Embassies program in Helsinki (2022-24), Hong Kong and Macau (2016-19); Nassau County Museum of Art (2024-25) and as an artist resident at the Parrish Art Museum (2021). His paintings are held in the collections of Grey Art Museum/New York University, The Heckscher Museum of Art, Parrish Art Museum and Guild Hall Museum. Dever is currently working towards his fourth exhibit at Berry Campbell Gallery in New York, July/August 2025.  

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The Nathaniel Rogers House

2539 Montauk Highway, Bridgehampton, NY 11932

www.bridgehamptonmuseum.org