WATER MILL, NY.- The Parrish Art Museum presents three solo exhibitions of East End artists peter campus (American, b. 1937), Virginia Jaramillo (American, b. 1939), and John Torreano (American, b.1941), which are on view November 7, 2021 to February 27, 2022. peter campus: when the hurly burly’s done; Virginia Jaramillo: The Harmony between Line and Space; and John Torreano: Painting Outer Space/Inner Space, 1989 to Present feature predominantly new, never-before-seen work by artists in the seventh decade of their careers and at the top of their creative powers. The exhibitions are organized by Alicia G. Longwell, Ph.D., the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Chief Curator at the Parrish Art Museum.

John Torreano: Painting Outer Space/Inner Space, 1989 to Present

John Torreano emerged as a painter in the late 1960s and has always charted his own course. With the universe as his muse, he combines realism infused with abstraction to create works that conflate time and space. Painting Outer Space/Inner Space, 1989 to Present features 10 large-scale paintings on plywood panels, studded with gems and wood balls. Torreano reflects on the mysteries and wonders of the cosmos in these works, which were inspired by images transmitted by the Hubble Space Telescope. Its scientific documentation of nebula and stars can also be read as pure abstraction—inspiring the artist to create imagery that contrasts the physical with the illusory.

Virginia Jaramillo: The Harmony between Line and Space




A pioneering minimalist who has practiced for more than six decades, Virginia Jaramillo creates her work from sources that span histories and cultures. The Harmony between Line and Space features five newly created paintings, which the artist completed in her Hampton Bays studio. The exhibition features two monumental works, Quantum Entanglement (2019–2020) and Quanta (2021), 12-foot canvases which have been installed face-to-face. In each painting, expansive fields of color are crisscrossed by impossibly uniform, razor-thin lines—the artist’s visualization of communication between quantum particles across the vastness of space. Additional works (all created in 2021) include Song of Amergin, which evokes the earliest spoken Irish poem, an incantation of man’s identity with nature; They Spoke without Talking depicts an epic confrontation between technology and creativity; and in Shaman’s Dream, Jaramillo explores the world of the unconscious mind.

peter campus: when the hurly burly’s done

A pioneering new media and video artist, peter campus made his first video in 1971, using black-and-white, portable equipment. This marked the beginning of his life-long engagement with the medium. In a solitary pursuit over this past year, campus captured locations around the shores of Shinnecock Bay near his home in East Patchogue, NY, stationing his video camera to maintain a static point of view. Nine of these continuous video loops—which are being presented on separate screens—invite the viewer to experience the sublime beauty of the natural and the ordinary: a hunter’s duck blind floats on the water, red plastic safety netting entwines a fence, beach grass and sparse leaves on a solitary tree blow in the wind. campus’s visual meditations underscore the gap between what the viewer perceives, what the camera records, and what the artist brings to the fore.

John Torreano works across myriad mediums and methods including paint, sculpture, relief, furniture, and hand-blown glass. He is perhaps best known for investigating the properties of real and fake gemstones through "movement oriented perception," which employs differing contexts, lighting, and placements of gemstones and other materials. Torreano’s work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of Art, New York and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; The Indianapolis Museum of Art, and many others. His series of paintings titled TV Bulge were featured in the 1969 Whitney Biennial. For three decades, Torreano taught at New York University’s studio art program in Manhattan and at New York University, Abu Dhabi.

Born in Texas and raised in East Los Angeles, Virginia Jaramillo began her career while still an art student, when she was accepted into the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Annual Exhibitions. From 1959 to 1961 her work was presented alongside established West Coast artists in the annual exhibitions under V Jaramillo—a name used by the artist to mask her gender. In the late 1970s Jaramillo focused on creating handmade paper and linoleum compositions before returning to painting in the ‘90s. She has been the subject of major solo exhibitions, including Virginia Jaramillo: The Curvilinear Paintings, 1969–1974, Menil Collection, Houston, September 2020 to July 2021. In 2017, exhibitions of her work were presented at the Brooklyn Museum and Tate Modern, London. She was recently featured in a group show at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles. Jaramillo’s work is in the permanent collections of the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; and Museo Tamayo, Mexico City.

Born in 1937 in New York City, peter campus earned a Bachelor of Science in Experimental Psychology from Ohio State University in 1960, studied at The City College Film Institute, and participated in the experimental workshops at Boston’s WGBH-TV. campus received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975 and the National Endowment for the Art Fellowship in 1976. He has exhibited widely throughout the U.S. and Europe and his work is in the permanent collections of The Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill; The Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Walker Art Center, Minnesotta; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; and Tate Modern, London).