Sean Scully Exhibition Explores His Transformative Time in Montauk

The Parrish Art Museum will exhibit “Sean Scully: The Albee Barn, Montauk,” a survey of the artist’s work ranging from 1981 to 2024,” in a show running May 11 to September 21. The exhibition will explore Scully’s Long Island connection and how a single month spent in Montauk in the summer of 1982 with a fellowship at The Edward F. Albee Foundation became a pivotal moment in the artist’s career.

“It has been a long-held aspiration to bring Sean Scully’s Montauk series to the East End, and I am thrilled to see that vision realized at the Parrish,” said Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, the Parrish Art Museum’s executive director. “A single month spent in the Albee Barn, Montauk, on the East End of Long Island in the summer of 1982 became a pivotal moment and place for Sean Scully. It marked his first intimate encounter with nature, having been raised in highly urban environments — and his time in Montauk was decisive.

“The exhibition ‘Sean Scully: The Albee Barn, Montauk’ features over 70 works spanning 1981 to 2024, telling the story of Sean’s extraordinary life and how far-reaching that experience of nature would become,” she continued. “A month in Montauk shaped not only Sean Scully’s development as an artist, but also, by extension, the entire field of geometric abstraction — of which he is now the preeminent contemporary figure.”

In 1981, Scully broke from Minimalism with his manifesto painting “Backs and Fronts,” embracing color and space with visible brushstrokes liberated from the constraints of taped lines. The following summer, his time in Montauk marked his first profound encounter with nature. Raised in urban environments, Scully found the natural surroundings transformative. Working in the Albee Barn, he created small multi-panel works on found wood, responding directly to the shifting light and landscape — a foundational approach that has shaped his practice ever since.

Reminiscing about his time at the Albee Residency, Scully acknowledged, “I’d already made the change in my work, in my breaking from Minimalism, by including metaphor, subjective colors, difficult relationships, abutment, and different titles; however, the time I spent in Montauk brought me closer to nature and enriched the relationship between my abstract paintings and the natural world.”

This exhibition brings together 15 of the original 1982 Montauk paintings for the first time since their creation, presented near the very site of their inspiration. The 70 works on view were chosen in collaboration with the artist to emphasize their connection to landscape and light. Key paintings include “Backs and Fronts” (1981), “Heart of Darkness” (1982), selections from the “Wall of Light” series last shown in New York at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2006, the “Landline” series previously exhibited at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2018 and the Wadsworth Atheneum in 2019, as well as the newly debuted “Wall Landlines and Tower” paintings — a monumental series started in 2024.

A fully illustrated exhibition catalogue, published by Hatje Cantz, will feature an introduction by exhibition curator Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, Ph.D., essays by Deborah Solomon, Steven Henry Madoff and Kaitlin Halloran, an interview between Scully and Ramírez-Montagut, a complete plate section, and a detailed chronology highlighting the artist’s life and career achievements. “Sean Scully: The Albee Barn, Montauk” is organized by Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, Ph.D. with associate and publications manager Kaitlin Halloran.

Sean Scully’s (b. 1945) work is in the collections of major museums worldwide. In 2014, he became the first Western artist to have a career-length retrospective in China. He was named International Artist of the Year in Hong Kong in 2018. Notable solo exhibitions include “Landline” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., which traveled to the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; “Landline and Other Works” at the De Pont Museum, Tilburg, Netherlands; “Sea Star” at the National Gallery, London; Vita Duplex at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Germany; and a presentation of sculptures at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, England. His figurative series “Eleuthera” was shown at the Albertina, Vienna; while retrospectives “Long Light” at Villa e Collezione Panza, Italy, and “Human” at San Giorgio Maggiore during the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019 further solidified his impact.

The last five years have been marked by the major 50-year career retrospective “Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in the United States, previously shown at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas in 2021, alongside multiple solo exhibitions and retrospectives worldwide, and the inclusion in 2024 of the “Sean Scully: A Romantic Geometry of Colors” room, in the collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France. In New York, “Broadway Shuffle,” an outdoor exhibition of seven sculptures, ran along the Broadway Malls in Manhattan from July 2024 to March 2025. This year, major solo exhibitions have opened at the Daegu Art Museum, South Korea; Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera, Casa Milà, Barcelona, Spain; and the Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg, Germany. Scully lives and works in New York, Bavaria, and Aix-en-Provence.

The Parrish Art Museum is at 279 Montauk Highway in Water Mill. For more information visit parrishart.org.