The Art of Eric Dever and Joel Perlman Opens the Bridgehampton Museum's 2025 Season

The Bridgehampton Museum opens its inaugural art exhibition of 2025 with a reception this Saturday, March 8, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. “Eric Dever: The Warhol Montauk Paintings” and “Joel Perlman: Finish and Form” marks the first in the museum’s initiatives focusing on East End artists as well as artists that are part of the museum’s permanent collection. The show remains on view through April 20.

This show consists of two artists’ work, however, it is being viewed 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.

Visitors are invited to explore, experience and be enlightened by the works of Dever and Perlman, two artists that the Bridgehampton Museum considers friends. The exhibition opens March 8 and runs through April 20.

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. Phillip Palmedo, the author of “Joel Perlman: A Sculptor’s Journey,” once described Perlman’s work as being “built like a Swiss watch, hits like a Mack truck.”

Perlman was born in New York City and maintains studios in both Tribeca and Water Mill. 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 at the 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 the public collections of the Hirshhorn 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.

In 2020, Eric Dever was invited to be a project artist at The Andy Warhol Preserve in Montauk administered by The Nature Conservancy. Eleven of his original paintings from the Warhol project are on display at the Bridgehampton Museum. In his work, 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 recently exhibited in the U.S. State Department’s “Art in Embassies” program in Helsinki (2022-24), Hong Kong and Macau (2016-2019); 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 toward his fourth exhibit at Berry Campbell Gallery in New York this July and August.

The Bridgehampton Museum’s Nathaniel Rogers House is at 2539 Montauk Highway in Bridgehampton. For more information on the show, visit bhmuseum.org.