Grace Hartigan painted Interior, The Creeks while renting a guesthouse at The Creeks, a lavish 57-acre estate in East Hampton, Long Island, where Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko often attended parties. The same artists were among Hartigan’s early influences and close friends. In 1958, Interior, The Creeks joined their works in the traveling exhibition The New American Painting, which was organized by New York’s Museum of Modern Art to introduce Europeans to groundbreaking developments in American art. A year prior to painting this work, Hartigan proclaimed, “I no longer invite the spectator to walk into my canvases. I want a surface that resists, like a wall, not opens, like a gate.” Here Hartigan eliminates the illusion of spatial depth that one expects in a representational image of an interior, balancing abstract forms and evocative shapes. While black lines and patches of color suggest the furniture and architectural details of a room, passages of overlapping color and energetic brush work obscure forms and emphasize the painting’s flatness.