Eric Firestone Gallery is pleased to present Susan Fortgang: The Spaces in Between, a survey of Fortgang’s career spanning from the mid-1960s through the present. The exhibition will be on view at the gallery’s 40 Great Jones Street location from January 15 through March 1.

This exhibition is a survey of nearly sixty years of work. It proceeds in clusters, coherent constellations, really: some closer together and others decades apart. But painting is a long game. I remember Joan Snyder telling a room of eager young graduates at a CAA convention, “it takes a long time to learn how to make a good painting,” something that nobody wanted to hear.

Eric Firestone Gallery is pleased to announce the inaugural exhibition and opening of its new West Palm Beach, FL location on January 31, 2026. The gallery will occupy a warehouse-style space in the up-and-coming Flamingo Park neighborhood, a newly established artworld hub. The gallery will showcase significant American artists of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, alongside contemporary counterparts. The inaugural exhibition is Cross Generational, including approximately twenty historic and contemporary artists.

Eric Firestone Gallery is pleased to participate in The Armory Show 2025 at the Javits Center. The gallery’s presentation will combine historic and contemporary sculpture and painting, drawing connections between generations and highlighting the work of artists currently featured in museum exhibitions.

West Palm Beach, FL – September 2024 – GAVLAK is thrilled to announce its upcoming group exhibition, Women In Abstraction: Shaping Expressionism, which will run from March 8, 2025 to April 5, 2025 at its West Palm Beach location. This ambitious showcase brings together the work of pioneering female artists who have each made a significant impact on the world of Abstraction Expressionism, whose bold innovations helped shape modern art.

A second generation of women abstractionists includes Nina Yankowitz (b. 1946), Pat Lipsky (b. 1941), and Susan Fortgang (b. 1944). Pat Lipsky’s work is associated with Lyrical Abstraction and Color Field painting. Her Wave paintings are exuberant, vivid, and fresh. They are, by necessity, painted in one shot: acrylic on unprimed canvas, with color bands in loose wave formations. The waveforms are loose and aqueous, made by soaking the canvas with water and pouring liquid color. The color bands often dissolve into drips and splatters within the rectangle of the canvas. The forms do not extend to the outer edges of the canvas; they float in its open space. Nina Yankowitz created daring, dynamic works: spraying mists of acrylic paint to produce atmospheric expanses and then hanging the unstretched canvases in loose soft folds that cascade down and across the wall. Yankowitz will be the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL, in Spring 2025. Susan Fortgang creates paintings with a physical presence, using thick layers of paint to form textured surfaces. She studied painting at Queens College, before going to Yale’s School of Art. where she would earn a BFA in 1966 and MFA in 1968. Early on, the artist made action paintings. These works from the late 1960’s employ vibrant palettes and biomorphic forms, capturing the excitement of the moment, undergirded by a logic of abstract shapes seemingly gravitating towards one another in companionship.  

Eric Firestone Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in the 2024 edition of The Armory Show. A cross-generational group of artists and estates will be on view, highlighting aesthetic connections across decades. With this installation, the gallery is pleased to introduce two artists: Walter C Jackson (b. 1940), a sculptor who was recently exhibited in the Just Above Midtown exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art; and Cybele Rowe (b. 1963), an Australian ceramicist based in Yucca Valley, CA, who makes monumental sculptures. 

Eric Firestone Gallery is pleased to announce that The Garage will re-open by appointment beginning Memorial Day Weekend. The Garage is the gallery’s sweeping 7,000 square-foot warehouse space at 62 Newtown Lane. The curation will rotate through the summer, with a “salon” installation combining historic material represented by the gallery, and younger generations of contemporary artists. Continuing to introduce new voices and establish connections with historically significant artists remains central to the gallery’s mission and its long-standing presence on Newtown Lane in East Hampton.

Loft Generation surveys painting in New York during the “pluralist” period of the 1960s–80s. Focusing on artists who worked in Manhattan’s expansive lofts, this show introduces the work of seven artists: Vincent Baldassano, Judith Blum Reddy, Susan Fortgang, Regina Granne, Evelyn López de Guzmán, George Mingo, and Naoto Nakagawa, who are showing with the gallery for the first time in New York, alongside several gallery artists. 

The artists were largely working in downtown Manhattan, in lofts that were raw but offered open, generous spaces and proximity to art materials and industrial materials that could be repurposed as experimental supplies. The artists in the exhibition come from diverse backgrounds, reflecting the art world’s increased openness to varied perspectives and the rise of alternative spaces in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Eric Firestone Gallery is pleased to announce a six-week exhibition in West Palm Beach, FL opening February 1st. On view through March 23, A New York Minute is a rotating selection of work from the 1950s through the 1980s by significant American artists. The exhibition is a powerful presentation of a diverse group of artists—including many women and artists of color—working across abstraction and representation in the post-war period. The exhibition is presented in partnership with New Wave Art Wknd, a non-profit arts organization founded by Sarah Gavlak.

"We are thrilled to welcome Eric Firestone's important program to Palm Beach," says Sarah Gavlak. "His decades-long commitment to shedding light on underrepresented artists aligns perfectly with New Wave's ethos. It will help us advance our mission, which is to expand the dialogue around contemporary art and provide a platform to learn, discover, and grow as a community."

Since Eric Firestone Gallery opened in East Hampton in 2010, and on Great Jones Street in New York City in 2015, its mission has been to investigate the ever-evolving canon of post-war American art. In this short period, the gallery has re-introduced the art world to several major artists working in the 1950s through the ‘80s and placed their work in museums across the United States and globally. Several of these artists will be the subject of, or included in, major museum exhibitions over the next two years. A New York Minute will reflect the gallery’s program and mission.