Already midway through the summer season, the Hamptons continues to be one of the East Coast’s most vibrant cultural destinations, with a calendar filled with exhibitions, pop-ups, performances, and culinary experiences. Alongside its celebrated social scene, the region’s galleries and museums are presenting thoughtful exhibitions that examine the evolving language of contemporary art through painting, sculpture, photography, and installation.
This season, artists revisit the legacy of American abstraction at HESSE FLATOW EAST, reinterpret the landscape through a contemporary lens, and transform everyday materials into poetic meditations on memory, texture, and making. A new artist book celebrates the creative community surrounding LongHouse Reserve, while solo exhibitions explore everything from porcelain as a metaphor for resilience to wood as an endlessly expressive material. Together, these Hamptons exhibitions reveal an art scene that is as reflective as it is experimental, connecting generations of artists while asking timely questions about history, materiality, and the ways we experience the world today.
Twenty-two artists come together in “SPLASH,” a group exhibition at HESSE FLATOW EAST in collaboration with Night Gallery, that examines what it means to be an abstract painter today. Working across diverse approaches to non-representational art, the exhibition considers how a new generation is extending the legacy of American abstraction on its own terms. Artists from New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, and beyond converge in Amagansett—a place forever linked to Lee Krasner, whose paintings were shaped by the area’s distinctive light and landscape. That same environment now provides the backdrop for an exhibition centered on today’s material and sensory practices.
Each artist approaches abstraction differently—through gestural marks, geometric compositions, luminous color, dense surfaces, or quiet, intimate forms—yet together they reveal a shared belief in color, texture, and mark-making as a language capable of communicating beyond representation. Housed in the former studio of Donald Baechler, HESSE FLATOW EAST deepens the exhibition’s dialogue with art history, making abstraction part of the experience from the moment visitors enter.