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Eric Dever (born 1962-    ) is an American abstract artist. He has lived and worked in California, New York and Eastern Long Island, which continue to inform his painting today. Dever has exhibited widely including, New York, Paris, Hong Kong and Los Angeles. His paintings can be found in the permanent collections of Grey Art Gallery/New York University; Parrish Art Museum, Guild Hall Museum and several others.

Early life and career

Eric Dever was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. He graduated from Westchester High School in 1980 with a precollege full scholarship to Otis College of Art and Design, which he completed, later graduating from California Lutheran University (BA’84).

The balance of his art education and career has been spent in New York. As he began graduate studies at New York University (MA, Steinhardt’88), artist Marcia Hafif, his advisor and mentor recalls “even in our first interview getting him into NYU art studies, I found him to be an unusual young man, and we did have a good rapport.” 1 Dever worked at the New Museum of Contemporary Art on Lower Broadway as a security guard while attending graduate school. During the early 1990’s, Dever had studios in Williamsburg, Brooklyn followed by another in the East Village, working part time in the architecture firm of I.M. Pei and Partners for over a decade.

Work

Dever began visiting Eastern Long Island after graduation and moved there in 2002 limiting his palette for 4 years to Zinc and Titanium White. This enabled Dever to uncover a white spectrum ranging from opacity to translucency, while developing a heightened sensitivity to the properties of the linen, canvas and burlap, providing both surface and support in the work. In 2007, He was commissioned to paint a suite of 8 white paintings for The Francis J. Greenburger Collection by curator Elisabeth Akkerman.

The Introduction of black in 2010 widened the range and force of the work. The new compositions were largely geometric including grayscales and circles graded from dark to light. Yoga studies led Dever to red, and an inward journey exploring the qualities of light energy and matter, principles discussed in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita. He began testing prepared red hues and by 2012 had arrived at Napthol Scarlet, a modern replacement for Vermillion. Working through some of the earlier compositions, relative color, presented as discussed by Josef Albers, emerged in this work. Background painting incrementally became foreground displaying a pulsing metallic quality made visible as similar values of opposite tones were placed alongside. In an exciting sense, color and painting itself becomes Dever’s subject.

On August 30, 2012, The Painting Plays opened at Guild Hall in East Hampton, New York, an exciting collaboration featuring Joseph Pintauro, the playwright of Cloud Life, and a large oil on burlap painting on stage with the same title by Eric Dever. A prescient work,“... which Pintauro admires for what he sees as its struggle between Dever’s signature reductive color minimalism and the artist’s morphing into representation...” 2 The following year was offered representation by Christine Berry and Martha Campbell, forming Berry Campbell, a gallery in New York. Working increasingly with gesture, pressing paint loaded surfaces onto the support, he had abstracted a single rose from his garden, ultimately spanning twenty six, 6 x 6 foot canvases. A selection of these paintings were featured in his first exhibition at Berry Campbell in 2014, and traveled to the US Consulate General of Hong Kong and Macau for an Art in Embassies, Department of State exhibition, 2016-19.

Like breaking a long fast, Dever began working with the full color spectrum and a palette prepared with the full color spectrum. On January 2019, Gail Sheehy recounts: “The joyful shock of walking into Berry Campbell’s Chelsea art gallery was to see an exhibition saturated with color. “The show...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.” 3 Dever’s painting approach also involves exchanging shapes between canvases, often through a imprint process of painting onto a surface and transferring that to a canvas. “These repetitions of forms and other planned elements, together with his more gestural painting of the rest of the canvas, creates a charged tension between spontaneity and organization...one of the ways de Kooning worked.” 4

An early pandemic studio view published in Hyperallergic, reveals paintings and a closer inspection of the unfolding spring palette resulting from mindful walks, looking up and focusing on the blossoming tree canopy. Forms appear weightless and at times dematerialize reversing figure and ground. “The outdoor Drive By exhibition on Long Island included works installed on 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—a dose of culture amid the sterile isolation imposed by the pandemic.” 5

In 2020, Dever completed a Warhol Foundation/Nature Conservancy-Montauk Project Artist residency. The Warhol Reserve is located at the eastern most tip of Long Island, paintings from this project highlight the palette of seasonal blue northeastern summer hues. Midpoint through the project, having left the actual Warhol site and exploring adjacent Montauket ancestral lands and vistas, Dever found himself taking cues from Andy Warhol’s self portrait pairing complementary or opposite colors which remains a hallmark of his painting today and include a reimagined view of Scallop Pond from Paumonok Path, the path dedicated to the Montauket King, Stephen Talkhouse Pharoah.

One Person Exhibitions (partial list)

2021 Eric Dever: The Montauk Series, presented by Berry Campbell Gallery on Artsy (online exhibition)

2020 A Thousand Nows, Lyceum Gallery, Suffolk County Community College-Eastern Campus, Riverhead, New York

2019 Painting in a House Made of Air, Berry Campbell Gallery, New York

2017 Light, Energy and Matter, William H. Hannon Library, and Master of Arts in Yoga Studies at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, California

2015 Clarity, Passion and Dark Inertia, Kimmel Galleries, New York University, New York

2014 Eric Dever, Berry Campbell Gallery, New York

The Rose Chapel, Kaiser Art Gallery, Molloy College, Rockville Centre, New York

1991 Moments Ephémères, Cloître des Billettes, Paris, France

Meditations, Hudson River Museum, Hastings on the Hudson, New York, (curated by Philip Verre)

1988 Eric Dever, 80 Washington Square East Galleries, New York University, New York

Group Exhibitions (partial list)

2022 A Visual Conversation (artist resident project and student collaboration), Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York

Drive-By-Art, Public Art in the Moment of Social Distancing. South Fork, Long Island, New York (organized by Warren Neidich)

2017 Parrish Perspectives: New Works in Context, Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York

Debtfair (participating artist), a project of Occupy Museums, Whitney Biennial 2017

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York

2016 U.S. Consulate General Hong Kong and Macau, Art in Embassies, Department of State (2016-19)

2014 Redacted: Connecting Dots Through a Shifting Field, Islip Art Museum, East Islip, New York, (curated by Janet Goleas)

2011 Doucement, ParisCONCRET, Paris, France

1993 History Painting, Spaces, Cleveland, Ohio

Talks and Interviews-video recorded (partial list):

2022 Nature into Art with Eric Dever, Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, East Hampton, New York

2021 Eric Dever, guest speaker, The Art Market, ART, Gail Levin, Distinguished Professor. The City University of New York, Baruch College

2019 Q&A: A Thousand Nows, with Eric Dever and Helen Harrison, Director, Pollack-Krasner House and Study Center, Lyceum Gallery, Suffolk County Community College-Eastern Campus, Riverhead, New York.

Q&A: Painting in A House Made of Air, with Eric Dever and Jesse Bransford, Clinical Associate Professor of Visual Arts and Art & Art Professions Department Chair. New York University/Steinhardt. Berry Campbell Gallery, New York.

2017 Light, Energy and Matter, William H. Hannon Library, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, California.

The Artist's View: Eric Dever on Parrish Perspectives: Art in Context, curated by Alicia G. Longwell at the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York

2016 American Art and India: Cultural Exchange Among Artists of India and the United States, by Gail Levin, Distinguished Professor of Art History, Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Pollock Krasner House Lichtenstein Lecture Series, East Hampton, New York.

2014 The Rose Chapel, Kaiser Art Gallery, Molloy College, Rockville Centre, New York.

References

1 S. Ravitz, personal communication, March 10, 2017

2 Baum, Joan. (2012, Aug 30). “When Art Inspires Playwrights,” The Sag Harbor Express. Retrieved from http://www.sagharborexpress.com

3 Sheehy, Gail. (2019, Jan 13) Gail Sheehy, Meta (page)

4 Landes, Jennifer. (2018, Jan 17). Review: “Color Unabashed in Eric Dever’s New Show in Chelsea,” The East Hampton Star.” Retrieved from https://easthamptonstar.com/Arts/2019117/Color-Unabashed-Eric-Dever’s- New- Show-Chelsea

5 Stacey Stowe “A Drive-By Art Show Turns Lawns and Garages Into Galleries,” Art and Design, The New York Times, New York, 12 May 2020, C2.

References[edit]

 * https://www.artandeducation.net/announcements/107193/eric-dever-the-rose-chapel
 * https://art.state.gov/personnel/eric_dever/artnet
 * https://art.state.gov/hong-kong-publication-2017/
 * https://www.berrycampbell.com/artist/Eric_Dever/info/
 * http://www.ericdever.com/images/Dever_Book_Web.pdf
 * https://issuu.com/berrycampbellgallery/docs/eric_dever_berry_campbell_gallery
 * https://hyperallergic.com/574492/a-view-from-the-easel-during-times-of-quarantine-14/
 * https://librarynews.lmu.edu/2017/05/eric-dever-light-energy-matter/
 * https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/11/arts/design/drive-by-art-long-island.html
 * https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/nyregion/shredded-sliced-and-covered-up.html
 * https://parrishart.org/artist-stories/#/artists/8690007
 * https://www.sunysuffolk.edu/news/deverexhibit.jsp#sthash.NJVgtWN0.dpbs
 * https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dever-rrose-maquinariadelanube-barcelona-september-2011-eric-dever
 * https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/love-crushed-pigment-and-hard-work-eric-dever-ma-88-his-artistic-process