Exhibitions
Robert Dash:
Work / Play
October 6 through December 31, 2023
The Madoo Conservancy is closed for the winter although the exhibition can be visited by appointment. To request an appointment please email info@madoo.org.
In his quintessential paintings of Sagaponack in the 1970’s, Robert Dash captured not only its landscape, people and architecture, he captured its vibe. And recognized the divide for which the groundwork was already being laid by the 1970s. This exhibition offers a pertinent and prescient juxtaposition of the two worlds that inhabit the Hamptons. One, of privileged leisure, and the other, of the indispensable but “unseen” workers who create the backdrop. Three paintings depict the tennis courts of Georgica Association and two are Sagaponack street scenes with work trucks.
Georgica Association #28, 1974
Acrylic on linen
70 x 60”
Past Exhibitions
Keith Sonnier: Selections from the Herd Series
July 15 to September 16, 2023
“Animals such as these form a profound part of ourselves—their images set in place when we are children. It is not necessary to have seen droves of migrating wildebeests to feel a familiarity, even a kinship, with the way they stand, run, or bow their heads to drink.” —Richard Kalina,
Keith Sonnier: Recent WorkPace Gallery, 2008
Keith Sonnier: Selections from the Herd Series features three neon sculptures and ten works on paper from 2006 – 2008. The abstract sculptures of the Herd series draw their inspiration from Africa and the wild animals of the Safari. Sonnier, a talented draftsman, immersed himself in studies of bone relics of Mastodons and other herd animals in the photographic archives and dioramas at the Museum of Natural History before embarking on the series. His process is revealed in the expressive and spontaneous works on paper which served as studies for the sculptures.
Keith Sonnier (1941- 2020) received a B.A. from the University of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette in 1963 and an M.F.A. from Rutgers University in 1966. Along with his contemporaries Bruce Nauman, Richard Tuttle, Eva Hesse, Richard Serra, and Barry LeVa, Sonnier radically reinvented sculpture in the late 1960s, calling all previous conceptions of the art form into question by employing unusual materials that pushed beyond Minimalism. In 1968, the artist began working with neon, which quickly became a defining element of his work, allowing him to draw in space with light and color while interacting with architectural planes. Sonnier participated in over 500 solo and group exhibitions throughout his career, including Documenta 5, Kassel (1972), the Venice Biennale (1972, 1982), and the Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1973,1977). In 1974, Sonnier was awarded first prize at the 9th International Biennial Exhibition of Prints, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. He was also a two time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Grant (1975, 1981) and was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1974.
Keith Sonnier
Kgama, 2007, Steel, paint, neon, neoprene, rubber and transformer,
83 x 35 x 40 inches
Dan McCleary
Still Lifes
May13–June 24, 2023
The practice of still life painting is timeless. Yet, what it is most concerned with is time. Through the forced isolation of the pandemic, Dan McCleary has focused exclusively upon painting the silent life of fruit and flowers. But illusion is secondary, the byproduct of acute observation and putting brush to canvas. Chasing time, recorded with color and line, the by and by changing flowers and fruit depicted in McCleary’s intimate paintings are captured just moments before imperceptible shifts appear inevitable. These still lifes live, offering a glimpse into the artist’s perception of that moment.
As part of this exhibition McCleary will be teaching a five-day, print-making course at the Madoo Conservancy for students of the Bridgehampton Child Care & Recreational Center and The Bridgehampton High School. This is based on his work at Art Division, a non-profit (501)(c)3 organization dedicated to training and supporting under-served youth who are committed to studying the visual arts. Art Division distinguishes itself by providing in-depth services to young adults aged 18-27.
Dan McCleary is an artist and founder of Art Division, an organization located in the MacArthur Park of Los Angeles. He is represented by Crail Krull Gallery in Santa Monica, California and Texas Gallery inHouston. His work can be found in many collections, including Metropolitan Museum of Art, LACMA inmLos Angeles, and the New York Public Library.
A full-color catalog produced for this exhibition with an essay by Bernard Cooper is available be emailing info@madoo.org
Mixed Flowers with Yellow Roses 12.23.22, 2022
Oil on canvas
Elizabeth Hazan
Sundown
April 1–May 7, 2023
Elizabeth Hazan, an artist who mines the fertile territory between abstraction and representation, spent a significant period of her childhood on the East End of Long Island, surrounded by the open farm fields moments from the ocean, but also by the palpable history of painting - the Action and Color Field paintings of the Abstract Expressionists and the concurrent avantgarde landscape painters. In Hazan’s work, painted as if hovering from above, time and space are collapsed into a heightened version of nature truer to experience, both internal and external. Imagery is a mixture of invention and recollection; meandering lines, both intuitive and decisive, loop the canvas loosely containing the soft-edge, idiosyncratic fields of rich color.
Elizabeth Hazan was born and raised in New York City and received a BA from Bryn Mawr College. She attended The New York Studio School and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and has twice been a resident of Yaddo. Solo and two-person exhibitions include Heatwave at Johannes Vogt, NYC in 2019, High Noon at Duck Creek, Springs, NY in 2021, and Body to Land at Turn Gallery, NYC in 2020. Her work has been included in recent exhibitions at Eric Firestone Gallery, Morgan Lehman Gallery, and The National Arts Club. She is the founder of Platform Project Space in Brooklyn, NY, featuring exhibitions of fellow contemporary artists.
Potato Field/Dusk, 2023
oil on linen, 66 x 55 inches
Robert Dash 1986/7
December 2, 2022–March 21, 2023
I do not paint in the way that I garden or garden as I would employ the brush although the process is often the same. — Robert Dash
The mid 80’s marked a profound shift in creative focus for Robert Dash in both painting and gardening. Extending beyond the “secret garden” in the courtyard of the summer house, Dash, immersed in the study of garden design and history, approached the land like he did a canvas, an uncharted territory primed for whimsical solemnity. Renowned for his bucolic depictions of the Sagaponack landscape from the 1970’s, influenced by his close relationship with Fairfield Porter, upon his return from a sojourn in Brazil, Dash changed his wrist, literally and figuratively to reflect a freedom with a whole new set of references. While the paintings in the exhibition retain elements of their precursors and anticipate their successors, they mark a definitive departure into the world of expressionism and abstraction.
Robert Dash, Breaking Corms, 1986,
Oil on linen, 76” x 76”
Susan Fisher
A Retrospective in Paintings
Curated by Connie Rodgers Tilton
September 24–November 19, 2022
The Madoo Conservancy is pleased to present Susan Fisher: A Retrospective in Paintings, curated by Connie Rodgers Tilton, featuring work by the late Susan Fisher Haag whose career in abstract painting has been unseen for 25 years. The exhibition will be on view in the summer studio from September 24 through October 23, 2022.
The works on display at Madoo Conservancy represent a sample of her paintings from 1986 to 1997 as well as the last works of her life, a series of watercolors representing water scenes from a cherished location, Gibson Lane Beach. Ms. Fisher paused her full-time artistic pursuit in abstract painting in 1997, putting her brushes and canvas aside to focus on a career in graphic design. While she only casually painted during the remaining years of her life, her inherent work ethic produced a voluminous amount of art in a scant dozen years.
Ms. Fisher’s passion for The Madoo Conservancy dates to February 2007 when she chose it as her wedding venue to Lawrence Haag. As only Susan could do, she made Madoo a focus of her attention assisting with artistic direction as it rebranded to pursue a larger audience in the nonprofit world of artistic culture on the East End. It is only fitting that her early passion, oil on canvas, be brought back to life with an exhibit of her art at Madoo.
Susan Fisher was born in 1963 in New Rochelle, NY and lived in NYC and Sag Harbor, NY where she died in 2020. She received her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 1987 after completing her BFA in painting at Parsons School of Design in1985 and studies in liberal arts at Hobart and William Smith College. She also studied with Milton Glaser at the School of Visual Arts. Ms. Fisher founded Juice Design Inc., a graphic design firm focusing on artistic branding for clients in the not-for-profit realm including Wellness In The Schools, The Madoo Conservancy, Park East Day School, The Juilliard School, The Fresh Air Fund, Ms. Foundation for Woman, Duke University and the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund.
New Life
Oil and wax on canvas
72 x 81 inches, diptych
Joe Zucker Detritus 2020
August 13 — September 17, 2022
Detritus 2020, a selection of serial works, are the result of Joe Zucker’s reflections upon past and present histories of Eastern Europe. Created while in isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic, the work is on view in the summer studio through September 17, 2022. As the world came to a standstill, Zucker used painting as a cure for malaise and Sholom Aleichem’s short stories as a guide in depicting the wreckage of Eastern Europe from violence and bloodshed. Re-using materials from the studio (cardboard, rubber flooring tiles, masking tape and felt tipped markers) to construct raw and powerful images of shtetls, Zucker has created a narrative that queries human existence when brutality is effortlessly overlooked and forgotten.
Read the New Criterion exhibition review here.
Joe Zucker was born in Chicago in 1941 and has lived in New York since the late 1960’s, settling in East Hampton in 1982. He was at the forefront of process art along with Barry Le Va, Richard Serra, Lynda Benglis, Chuck Close and Brice Marden and is credited with having a profound influence upon both his contemporaries and generations of younger artists. In addition to exhibiting nationally and internationally, Zucker has had solo shows at the Parrish Museum of Art in Watermill and a two person show with Lynda Benglis at Guild Hall in East Hampton.
The Man From Europa, 2021
Acrylic on interlocking floor mats
48 x 48 inches
Robert Harms: Paintings
July 1 — August 7, 2022
Robert Harms: Paintings is an exhibition featuring 11 paintings made over the past two years. In idyllic seclusion, Robert Harms practices his own brand of rustic lyricism from his cottage-like studio overlooking Little Fresh Pond in Southampton. Underlying his poetic approach to painting is a reliance upon intense observation of the subtle shifts in light and fleeting atmospheric effects inherent to this setting. But Harms’ “landscapes” are filtered through a devotion to abstraction seeded by formative personal relationships with first generation abstract expressionists. He does not paint the landscape, but evokes the experience of being in the landscape. Read the East Hampton Star review here.
Robert Harms (born 1962, Long Island, NY) lives and works in Southampton, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include Rebecca Ibel Gallery in Columbus, OH, Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects in New York City and The Drawing Room in East Hampton, NY. Harms is the recipient of awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the National Arts Club, and his work is in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guild Hall Museum and The Parrish Art Museum. He attended The School of Visual Arts in New York City and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.
Object & Thing at Madoo: Megumi Shauna Arai and Frances Palmer
May 27 – June 25, 2022
Both Megumi Shauna Arai and FrancesPalmer have made new works in response to the unique Madoo environment. This is reflected in the oribe and kaki-colored glazes of Palmer’s wood fired vessels as well as the brightly colored noren and framed wall works – a new direction for Arai – yet, still the result of a natural dye process done by Arai in her Brooklyn studio. Palmer’s pots are hung salon-style on the walls and displayed on Dash’s own work tabletops and desks, including in the Red Living Room of the summerhouse. Inspiration for several of the works by Arai has come from the Zen poet and calligrapher Mitsuo Aida, a figure important to Arai throughout her life. Read the Glen Adamson essay on the exhibit here.
The Artists’ Circle: Selections from the Robert Dash Collection
April 9 – May 21, 2022
Curated by Eric Brown
Our first exhibition of the 2022 season features artworks and poetry that were collected by Madoo founder Robert Dash and tell a story of life on the East End in simpler times. Curator and painter Eric Brown has assembled a selection of works along with furniture and pottery from Madoo in the summer studio. Originally, Dash’s collection hung throughout both houses on the property along with original manuscripts (now in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University) of poetry by James Schuyler, Frank O’Hara, John Ashberry, Douglas Crase and others. Exhibited to the public for the first time, this grouping of works, as Brown says, “…is about connection, friendship, and the vibrant artist community of the East End of Long Island that sprouted in the 1950s. Along with Dash, many of the artists — including Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Fairfield Porter, and Jane Freilicher — were at the center of a fertile and creative community.”
The exhibition is accompanied by an essay by poet Douglas Crase
Alex Katz
Robert Dash ca. 1958
oil on canvas on wood
Robert Dash: New Acquisitions
November 20, 2021 – January 2, 2022
Since the passing of Robert Dash (1931-2013), The Madoo Conservancy has been acquiring his works with the intention of improving and expanding our collection. Recent additions through purchase and donation include several important examples of his work from the early 1960s to the late 1970s. Untitled (1961) was used as the image on the announcement for Dash’s first New York exhibition at Barone Gallery. Of special importance are works that document the story of Madoo, and two paintings in the exhibition depict vignettes of the interior and exterior of The Summer House and Studio. Dining, Spring (1972) is an intimate painting of Robert Dash’s dining room with a view of Foster Farm through the large, central windows, and Untitled: Arbor at Madoo (1970) shows a long gone arbor and the original white trim and brown shingle color story of The Summer Studio. Finally, the large painting, After a Downpour, I (1977) and the work on paper, To Bridgehampton (1976), reveal Dash’s mastery of brushstroke and unique palette, depicting the often returned to scene of Sagg Main Street.
Spencer Finch:
This room needs flowers.
August 20 – September 24, 2021
In This room needs flowers., Spencer Finch presents five intimate works that speak poetically to the patience and persistence of the avid gardener. Employing watercolor, woodblock and photography, Finch creates work that feels constructed of color, time, light and air - recording and mimicking natural phenomena of falling leaves and cherry blossoms, chronicling blooms and observing the subtleties of a day in the life of a daisy. This room needs flowers. takes its name from a line in the poem Afterward by Robert Dash’s close friend and collaborator James Schuyler.
Spencer Finch (born 1962, New Haven, CT) has exhibited extensively in the US and internationally. Recent major projects include Fifteen Stones (Ryoanji) at the Fundació Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona, Spain (2018); A Cloud Index, a site-specific commission for Paddington Station in London (2018); and Trying To Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning, for the 9/11 Memorial, New York, NY (2014). His work can be found in collections including The Hirshhorn Museum, The National Gallery of Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and The Whitney Museum of American Art. Spencer Finch lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Billy Sullivan: Flowers & Birds
July 3 – August 14, 2021
Billy Sullivan: Flowers & Birds features nine still-life paintings and drawings, most of which were completed within the past year — a time of profound upheaval that has nevertheless seemed intractably stilled, indefinitely paused. Billy Sullivan has described his work as “basically a diary of my life,” and these recent works, predominantly floral, are marked by brief moments of focus and oblique clues. One outlier, Bob’s Vase cites Madoo itself, presenting a mysterious object from Robert Dash’s collection. The antique-looking, bulging glass vessel with verdigris brass handles somehow manages to hold its own against the scrawled red walls of the summer house living room.
Billy Sullivan has exhibited nationally and internationally since 1971. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Parrish Art Museum, Guild Hall of East Hampton, as well as many other collections, both public and private. He lives and works in New York City and East Hampton.
Nicholas Howey:
The Color of Science
May 22–June 26, 2021
These 16 works on paper reveal Howey’s recent explorations into the intimate immediacy of watercolor and offer a fresh perspective on Howey’s process and its conceptual underpinnings. In this series, the fluidity and sensual gesture of watercolor are at the fore, emphasized even more through the occasional occurrence of punctuation by small, opaque, hard-edged geometric forms. Howey succeeds in creating a sophisticated and idiosyncratic pictorial language that references primitive hieroglyphics and imbues post-minimal abstraction with the mysticism of Tantric art. Primal and spontaneous, contemplative and urbane, these works reveal an artist playing seriously.
Nicholas Howey lives and works in Bridgehampton, NY. Born in DuBois, Pennsylvania, Howey received a BA from The University of Pittsburgh and an MA from New York University. Howey has exhibited nationally and internationally with solo shows in New York, Italy, France and Belgium.
Robert Dash: Early Landscapes
April 2—May 15, 2021
Robert Dash: Early Landscapes takes its cue from Madoo’s recent acquisition of a seminal painting which served as the announcement card image for his first solo exhibition at Barone Gallery in New York City in 1961. The twelve paintings from 1960-61 in the current exhibition mark the transition in Dash’s work from his earliest forays in painting to Painting per se, encouraged by his close friendships with the artists Fairfield Porter and Alex Katz and the poets James Schuyler and John Ashbery. Always inspired by the landscape, yet never a plein air painter, Dash depended upon memory, imagination, and invention to construct verdant landscapes of pigment and brushstrokes imbued with a poets’ knack for creating fact through fiction. These early paintings firmly established Dash’s reputation as a young painter of tremendous promise and introduced conceptual and aesthetic concerns inherent in his work throughout his career.
Robert Dash: Printmaker
March–December 2020
The prints in the exhibition are a continuation Dash’s quintessential paintings of the Sagaponack landscape from the 1970s—80s. Employing a variety of techniques including lithography, serigraphy, and pochoir, they reveal the reciprocal relationship between painting and printmaking in his work. Pochoir offered Dash the possibility of placing a singular composition into a state of flux, altering colors, shifting focal points and playing with positive and negative space. In 2006, Dash took a stack of unsigned, uneditioned serigraphs produced in 1972, gessoed over them, and created a large series of palimpsests, poetic gestures capturing the disappearing spirit of the Sagaponack once home only to farms and artists and writers.
Marina Adams: SongLines
November–December 2019
Marina Adams is considered one of the foremost non-objective artists working today, known for monumental paintings composed of vast areas of vibrant color within organic geometries. Though the smaller scale of the paintings in Marina Adams: SongLines implies and lends itself to moments of intimate contemplation, it also creates a tension, both physical and metaphysical, where pulsating colors are barely contained and push the boundaries of the canvas.
Laurie Lambrecht: Limn to Limb
October–November 2019
The site-specific installation, Laurie Lambrecht: Limn to Limb, celebrates the legacy of Robert Dash’s gardens by responding to Madoo’s environment and brightly-painted structural details with interventions that include photography, printmaking, weaving, and knitting. Limn to Limb comprises three elements: large-scale prints of tree bark, hand-knitted covers for stones, weavings with photo printed fabric, and the use of hand-dyed twine and burlap as a decorative, contrasting element on the grounds. The exhibition is part of Parrish Road Show, the Parrish Art Museum’s off-site cultural engagement program.
Fields and Fences: Paintings 1998–99
August–October 2019
“The field was tended and cherished like any object of vertu. Unlike porcelain, however, whose pieces may be glued, the field is valueless and irreclaimable, the light of centuries of harvest snuffed.”
—Robert Dash, Notes from Madoo
Fields and Fences: Paintings 1998-99 is a series of paintings indebted to Robert Dash’s well-known paintings from the 1960s and 70s of a now all but vanished Sagaponack landscape. Vibrant orange and yellow, pink and red, laid down with brushstrokes alternately fluid and harsh, push past the now ambiguous forms (fence or phallus) carefully scrawled in dark gestural lines of charcoal.