South Etna: A Pop-Up Provides Food for Thought in Montauk

If it is true, you are what you eat, at South Etna’s inaugural show in Montauk, “Painting is Painting’s Favorite Food: Art History as Muse,” art was most nourishing. At this week’s official gallery opening, a masked affair of course, scenesters and artists alike gathered in the outdoor space beside the exhibition space to talk art, to see each other, and queue up to view the work, only four at a time in the two-room faux Tudor space. Over Pimm’s and iced tea, a lively group including Cynthia Rowley, Ugo Rondinone, Stella Schnabel and many others congratulated Amalia Dayan and Adam Lindemann on this tasteful pop-up gallery. As joyful as the art is colorful and fresh, curated by Alison M. Gingeras, the event was a nostalgic nod to our pre-pandemic celebrations.

As you enter the gallery on the right, a post-expressionist painting, “The Seated Painter (After Vermeer),” illustrates at once the quality of work in the exhibition, and its theme, the way in which art inspires art. A figure seated at an easel has his back to us, perhaps the artist known as Maryan himself in 17^th century dress, from 1966. Born Pinchas Burstein, Maryan survived Auschwitz and lived for a time in New York, famed among artists.

Some of the work is dated this year: Hadi Fallahpisheh, a Teheran born artist with a background in graphic design, is represented here with two cartoonish light drawings on photosensitive paper. With two works in the show, Scott Covert’s painting and drawings suggest gravestone rubbings. One featuring Edith Metzger in pastel and ballpoint pen on paper recalls her 1956 death in Jackson Pollock’s car, bringing us back to a pivotal event in local history. And in the spirit of our current collective moment, Rachel Feinstein’s masks, two evocative renderings of her own face in oil on plaster seem most resonant of a moment when faces are hidden.