Bruce Lieberman: Paintings

The Bridgehampton Museum is pleased to present Bruce Lieberman: Paintings, a new exhibition of work by East End artist Bruce Lieberman, opening Saturday, March 14 and on view through Saturday, April 11 at the historic Nathaniel Rogers House.

“I am trying to create the greatest paintings that I can make,” Lieberman writes. “Work that transcends the contemporary issues of photography, market, and fashion. It is a conversation with the history of painting and a reaction to pretense and the photographic. Lieberman is speaking the language of painting. His work deals with painted space and composition and embraces the quality of paint and the process. It is a painted love song, replete with its unvarnished humanness and unabashed brush marks, human marks- his marks. His work grows from a quiet, and not so quiet, insistence on the personal, the intimate, and sincere- the enduring truth.

Although a viewer may first encounter a tree, it moves beyond the simple recording of appearance. Color and gesture convey the sensation of light, wind, and atmosphere, while compositional relationships unfold with a musical sensibility. Forms are adjusted, pressed, and sometimes contorted, revealing a dynamic interplay between improvisation and intention. What emerges is both a dance and a negotiation, a record of how a painting is constructed over time.

Poet Richard Elman once observed of Lieberman: “He’s a painter of great potential range and ambition who has had the good sense, for the moment, to stare with painterly delight at a clump of blooming forsythias that have somehow escaped with all their vividness the martyrdoms of lawn care.” Elman notes the conviction, intelligence, and gritty playfulness in Lieberman’s work, where ordinary materials are transformed through close attention and curiosity.

Working intuitively yet with disciplined sensitivity, Lieberman builds surfaces through improvisation, allowing forms to emerge gradually. The paintings are both spontaneous and deliberate: areas dissolve and re-form, edges soften, and color carries the emotional weight of the image Rather than offering a single fixed viewpoint, each painting becomes a meditation on perception itself, a sustained act of looking.

Critics have often noted the artist’s commitment to painting as an ongoing process of discovery. Rooted in Abstract Expressionism yet unmistakably tied to the coastal landscape of eastern Long Island. Lieberman’s paintings reflect a deep commitment to the enduring language of paint. They affirm painting as a living, evolving practice capable of conveying sensation, duration, and presence.

Bruce Lieberman: Paintings brings together a focused selection of recent and earlier works, offering viewers an opportunity to encounter the evolution of an artist who has quietly shaped the region’s artistic dialogue for decades.