The Bridgehampton Museum has a new exhibition space: the Corwith Homestead Tractor Barn, a renovated structure on the historic William A. Corwith Homestead campus at 2368 Montauk Highway. Its inaugural program belongs to Mark Seidenfeld, the Hamptons-based abstract painter whose practice has spent three decades investigating the territory between surface and depth, structure and dissolution.
"Uncharted Waters" opens June 4 and runs through June 21 — a tight three weeks that suits work that rewards sustained attention rather than casual browsing.
“For me, painting is not a relaxing pastime or an exercise in decoration. Each canvas is a journey into experimentation. It is only by navigating, and sometimes fighting my way to a place beyond influences and past experiences, that I have the chance to make something true, and unique to me.”Mark Seidenfeld
The works in the exhibition evolve from earlier representational foundations into fully realized abstraction, where landscape gives way to something more internal. These are not paintings that resolve. They advance through instability — each extending rather than restating the last, each engaging what Seidenfeld identifies as the Unknown: a condition that resists repetition and continuously shifts.
The practice is defined by surface: built, disrupted, and recalibrated. Works such as "Time Traveler" (2021, oil on panel, 52" x 60") and the recently completed "When Flowers Whisper" (2026, acrylic on canvas, 30" x 40") show the range the approach contains. The former carries the weight and compression of accumulated marks; the latter opens toward something more lyrical. Installed within the scale and structure of the barn, the paintings activate the space rather than simply occupying it.
Seidenfeld was born in New York City in 1954. He lives and works in the Hamptons. His practice is defined by a sustained engagement with painting as an evolving process shaped by perception and revision.
Seidenfeld's statement on his work is worth quoting at length, because it explains not just what the paintings do but why the doing matters. He describes painting as an alchemical process — one that transforms emotion, vision, awareness, and instinct into something he calls "illuminated and empowered." The paintings, in his framing, are not finished objects so much as records of a particular kind of internal navigation. "Art is a transformation accelerator," he has said.
The Corwith Homestead Tractor Barn is a fitting context for work that is itself about the renovation of perception. The Bridgehampton Museum, dedicated to ambitious exhibitions and the preservation of East End cultural history, expands its capacity with this new space. Seidenfeld's solo show is a strong opening statement for what the barn can hold.
"Uncharted Waters" is on view June 4 through June 21, 2026, at the Corwith Homestead Tractor Barn, 2368 Montauk Highway, Bridgehampton.
For more information: www.markseidenfeld.com | www.bridgehamptonmuseum.org