Purist invites art aficionados of the Hamptons to join ARC Fine Art in celebrating the gallery’s inaugural exhibition in collaboration with Schoelkopf Gallery on Saturday, July 2 from 4-7PM at 37 Newtown Lane in East Hampton. Email infoarcfineart@gmail.com to RSVP!
New this summer to the East Hampton art scene, ARC Fine Art, a contemporary art gallery based in Fairfield, Connecticut, has opened its doors at 37 Newtown Lane. Established in 2009 by Adrienne Ruger Conzelman, the gallery has hosted previous exhibitions during the summers of 2014 and 2019 in the hamlet of Amagansett. In 2022, the gallery will be open Thursdays through Mondays 11AM to 5PM and Sunday from noon to 4PM.
In addition to offering a rotating selection of works by the gallery’s long-standing artists, ARC Fine Art is collaborating with Schoelkopf Gallery of Manhattan. Former colleagues at Christie’s in the 1990s and longtime friends, Andy Schoelkopf and Conzelman share a passion for American art and will present a curated selection of works by 20th-century American masters from the Schoelkopf Gallery, which will be on view alongside 21st-century works from ARC Fine Art’s stable of artists. Holding a Master’s in art history from Williams College with a concentration in American art, and having worked as a specialist in the American Paintings Department at Christie’s, Conzelman is well poised to offer works of this era and quality.
Oil paintings, watercolors and sculpture by American artists Milton Avery, John Marin, Charles Burchfield, Marsden Hartley, Rockwell Kent, Alexander Calder, and Harry Bertoia will be featured alongside contemporary works by Richard Estes, Ugo Rondinone, Massimo Vitali, Donald Baechler, Ross Bleckner, Caio Fonseca and Donald Sultan, among other gallery artists, many of whom live and work on the East End of Long Island. Although much of the work by these contemporary artists was produced nearly 100 years after the majority of the Schoelkopf collection, parallel themes exist through each piece, creating a cohesive showcase that celebrates the wonders of the natural world.
The lure of nature, in particular the boundless sea and sky, is evidenced in the majority of pieces on view. Artists since the beginning of time have been captivated by their natural surroundings and thus it is not surprising that these figures, whether of the 1920s or the 2020s, found inspiration in the coastlines and landscapes they inhabited. In similar ways, the expansiveness of the Atlantic Ocean and the seemingly infinite desert and big sky of the American West acted as gateways to the divine, usually offering a sense of peace and calm. In addition to this call of the natural world, artists of both centuries placed great importance on color, line and form and an earlier interest in abstraction among the Modernists led to a full-blown obsession with the nonobjective evident in much of the contemporary art on view.
Learn more at arcfineartllc.com