FEATURED ARTISTS

The Grenning Gallery is pleased to announce our third annual Hunt Slonem Solo Exhibition, Opening Thursday June 25th at 26 Main Street, Sag Harbor, NY, 11963. Please join us at our Opening Reception Thursday evening, from 6:30 – 8:00pm; the artist will be in attendance.  The exhibition will hang through Sunday July 19th.

Hunt Slonem returns to Grenning with varying configurations of his iconic bunnies. He, of course, elaborates on this subject in various colors, sizes and compositions. These simple flick-of-the-wrist rabbits have become synonymous with Hunt Slonem – some say it’s his signature motif. These bunnies often sit atop one another, squeezing together tightly as if in anticipation for a family photograph. Although repetition is clearly a vessel for Slonem’s creative output, each bunny embodies its own individual identity.

This year, Slonem delivers “Fluffle 3 with Butterflies”, a large golden canvas chock-full of bunny rabbits and white butterflies. This pairing of bunnies and butterflies creates a kind of spiritual duality – earthly luck, abundance, and fertility (the rabbit) alongside transcendence and transformation (the butterfly). The widespread use of repetition by Slonem is a form of creative meditation that unlocks subconscious sentiment, so the combination of these two symbols isn’t decorative so much as it is devotional.

The largest painting this year, however, does not feature Slonem’s signature motif – instead, a family of owls amongst the trees. Unlike Slonem's bunnies, which multiply in cheerful chorus, these owls preside. A parliament of mixed species — great horned, barred, and beyond — emerges from a silver ground that glows like pooled moonlight, the forest rendered in urgent strokes of black and blue. The composition is dense but not frantic; each owl holds its place with a stillness that feels ancient. In many traditions, the owl is a keeper of hidden knowledge, a creature at home in the space between worlds. Here, they seem utterly unbothered by our arrival.

In Monsoon Ascension II, Slonem captures transformation at its most literal — white butterflies rising through a curtain of falling rain. The canvas is built in layers: a silver ground cross-hatched with fine blue lines, then vertical streaks of deep navy dripping earthward, and finally the butterflies themselves, scattered at varying states of materialization. Some are fully rendered in white; others exist only as dark outlines, as if still deciding whether to arrive. The effect is of a world caught between states — between storm and stillness, between form and flight. Ascension, here, is not triumphant. It is quiet, inevitable, and ongoing.

A departure from Slonem’s usual menagerie, Blue Abraham Lincoln turns the same feverish brushwork toward portraiture. Rendered in cobalt and white against a brilliant blue ground, Lincoln emerges with startling presence — familiar yet newly alive, as if seen through the painter's own devotion. One of Slonem's most enduring portrait subjects, Lincoln — long regarded as an icon of moral integrity and principled leadership — feels especially resonant this year as America marks its 250th birthday. At an intimate 20 x 16 inches, the portrait carries the quality of a personal icon, something kept close.

Rounding out the exhibition, a selection of smaller works on panel — spanning bunnies, butterflies, owls, and monkeys across a vibrant range of colors and grounds — each one a concentrated expression of the same devotional energy that defines his larger canvases.

The Grenning Gallery is pleased to announce our first Solo Exhibition for Australian artist, Emily Persson. Please help us celebrate Persson, who will be traveling over 10,000 miles to attend our Opening Reception Saturday May 2, 5:30-7:00pm at 26 Main Street, Sag Harbor, NY, 11963. The exhibition will hang through Memorial Day, Monday, May 25th.

Seven years ago, Gallery Manager Megan Toy discovered Persson's work on Instagram and immediately reached out. Toy was curating an exhibition titled "Thick & Wet," and Persson's signature palette-knife impasto applied to traditional subjects was exactly what she was looking for. Persson submitted seven small-scale paintings — all of which sold. Since then, she has appeared in several group shows, a two-person show in 2024, and a three-person show in 2025. Persson visited Sag Harbor for the first time in 2024, returning home to paint a collection of local scenes that proved enormously popular. Coming from Australia's arid climate, she brings a fresh eye to the lush East End landscape — the privet hedges, hydrangeas, rose bushes, and coastal shrubs are all entirely new to her.

“I Wonder So I Wander” presents a verdant scene of Sag Harbor. A front yard on Main Street is bordered by freshly cut privet and showered in shade from mature trees. Each leaf is defined with Persson’s palette knife, appearing to flutter in the breeze. A white crossbuck gate bridges the gap between two hedges: a subtle barrier of exclusive privacy. A humble white cottage glows in the sunlight towards the back of the yard. And beyond this expanse of trees and green grass, lies the silver surface of the sea.

In “Island Life”, Persson offers a clear view of the sea, flanked by the lush greenery she’s smitten with. Docks reach out from the shoreline into the sea, and sailboats bob and sway atop the silky blue surface. Situated within the shade, and looking out towards the bright open water, the viewer finds rest, as if they are sitting on the very hill Persson has placed us on.

In “Everything is Everything”, Persson presents the shining sea in all its glory. The power of the vast ocean, the momentum of waves approaching shore, and the gentle shallow recession from the sand is intoxicatingly calming. Persson has captured all of this under a bright sun which casts sparkles across the painting.

That same effervescent shimmer is present in “Direct Beach Access” which places the viewer in the back yard of a waterfront home. A privet hedge lines the property line, and wooden steps lead down to the dock. The yard is adorned with bushes of hydrangeas and reaching pollinators. The sea reflects the blue sky above it and leads the eye towards distant peninsulas.

In addition to these striking landscapes, Persson also delivers sumptuous close-ups of roses, hydrangeas, and white dogwood blossoms, and ventures into moodier territory with stormy weather scenes like “I'm as Free as the Breeze”. A glimpse of NYC's Central Park and one small painting of her Australian homeland round out the show, offering a telling contrast in landscape.

Emily Persson's solo debut at The Grenning Gallery is a homecoming of sorts — not for the artist, but for the landscape itself, seen clearly for the first time through an outsider's eyes. The exhibition runs May 2-25, 2026, at 26 Main Street, Sag Harbor, NY. Opening Reception is Saturday, May 2nd, 5:30-7:00pm. For inquiries, please contact the gallery at 631-725-8469.

The Grenning Gallery is pleased to present Primavera, an exhibition of new work by Canadian-born, New York–based painter Kristy Gordon, accentuated by the colorful whimsy of world-renowned artist, Hunt Slonem. On view from April 4 through April 28, 2026, the exhibition is anchored by its namesake oil painting measuring 50 by 87 inches and brings together a suite of new paintings that mark a lyrical evolution in Gordon's ongoing exploration of myth, transformation, and the sacred feminine. Join us for the Opening Reception on Saturday, April 4th, 5:30-7:00pm, where Kristy Gordon be present.

The heart of the exhibition, Primavera (2026), is a monumental canvas that invites the viewer into a world poised between the earthly and the eternal. Like Botticelli's timeless allegory before it, Gordon's Primavera is dense with symbolism and tenderness. Figures move through a verdant forest, draped in light and color that feels both ancient and urgently alive.  A child carefully skims the surface of a babbling brook, hovering over the mystery of what lies beneath. A contemporary depiction of the Three Graces dances in a circle, enrobed by rays of sunlight. A pair of deer stand in the center, beneath an ethereal form of Mother Nature, while on the far right, a pair of lovers step into the forest with open arms. Massive pink lilies bloom in the foreground of the composition, reminding the viewer that despite human interference, the purity of nature will always prevail.

In As Above So Below, Gordon sought inspiration from Jan van Eyck’s The Last Judgement (c.1438), reinterpreting the Flemish masterpiece in contemporary terms. Gordon’s tableau showcases the divide between the realms of the living and the dead. The underworld beneath the earth’s surface - once thought to be hell - now serves as a catalyst for regeneration: a glowing forge where bodies are chewed up by mysterious creatures only to be reincarnated as beautiful flowers.

In van Eyck’s painting, the central figure is Archangel Michael, a revered spiritual warrior who protects heaven from darkness; yet in Gordon’s work, she is merely an unarmed child. Above, is meant to represent Heaven - made explicit in van Eyck’s original, where Christ rises as the foremost figure in the sky’s center. Gordon, however, presents that central figure as a woman pirouetting in place, an orb of light glowing where her head would be. The masses might be expected to appear elated at having reached heaven, yet Gordon’s crowd seems on edge, bracing for what lies ahead. Two camouflage-clad figures aim pistols at each other, pointedly addressing the epidemic of gun violence in contemporary society. Perhaps above is just as chaotic as below.

These mythic and spiritual currents run not only through Gordon’s imagery, but into the very materials she has chosen for this body of work. This year, Gordon has employed ancient pigments derived from earth's natural minerals. Lapis Lazuli, a velvety blue stone, has been used to adorn art and decorative objects as far back as ancient Egypt, and makes frequent appearances in Gordon’s new series of paintings. Revered historically as a gemstone of royalty, truth, and wisdom, it is often associated with the Third Eye chakra, fostering deep enlightenment. Malachite - known as the stone of transformation and a protector from negative energy - yields vibrant green hues. Azurite, known as the stone of heaven, symbolizes deep insight and enhanced intuition, and offers deeper blue tones. Rhodonite, a rose-red mineral, is often called the stone of love or the rescue stone, symbolizes self-love, compassion, and solace from grief.

The works of Hunt Slonem (b. 1951, Maine, USA), which accentuate this exhibition, carry a spiritual depth that is easy to underestimate at first glance. Though some viewers are quick to read Slonem as a fashion-forward pop artist, few realize that he meditates and prays for hours before picking up a brush each day — and that while painting, he regards each canvas as a kind of mantra, imbued with its own distinct energy at the moment of its creation. His iconic subjects — bunnies, birds, butterflies, and flowers — are chosen with reverence and intent, not merely rendered as likenesses. Slonem was born in 1951, the Year of the Rabbit in the Chinese Zodiac, and the rabbit has become his most enduring motif: in Christianity, it represents rebirth, fertility, and resurrection; in Buddhism, humility, kindness, and compassion. That the same image can hold such varied meaning speaks to Slonem's all-encompassing spirituality — one that leaves the door open for whatever conclusion the viewer wishes to draw. It is a generosity that has earned him a massive following, an extraordinarily in-demand market, and a global reputation built across more than 250 museum collections worldwide.

In reaching back to ancient images and ancient earth, Gordon finds a language for the present moment — one that is luminous, searching, and very much alive. Slonem, too, is an artist in perpetual communion with something larger than himself, returning day after day to the same sacred subjects, finding in repetition not monotony but deepening meaning. Together, these two artists remind us that the spiritual and the painterly have never truly been separate, and that art, at its most sincere, is always an act of devotion. The Grenning Gallery invites you to experience this extraordinary body of work and to join us in celebrating two artists who are each, in their own way, at the height of their powers.