Sean Scully: The Albee Barn, Montauk Solo exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum . (This link opens in a new tab).
Sean Scully: The Albee Barn, Montauk is a survey of the artist’s work ranging from 1981 to 2024, exploring his 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 place and moment in the artist’s career.
It was in 1981 that Sean Scully broke the hold of Minimalism with his manifesto painting Backs and Fronts. There was a return of color and space. Brushstrokes were now visible, broken free of the constriction of taped lines. But it was the following summer of 1982 spent in Montauk that provided the artist’s first intimate encounter with nature; an experience which, for Sean Scully—brought up in highly urban environments—was decisive. A month painting in the Albee ‘Barn’ gave Scully the freedom to produce small multi-panel works on found scraps of wood as a direct response to the movement of light and the environment around him, an approach that has been a touchstone in Scully’s work ever since.
This exhibition recalls this transformative moment by bringing together 15 of the original 1982 Montauk paintings for the first time since their time in the Barn, in the same geographic region near the site where they were inspired and produced 43 years ago. The exhibition includes over 70 works in total, chosen in collaboration with the artist to highlight the works’ contextual site—landscape and light—while engaging the viewer in the same context. Further rooms are filled with important paintings such as Backs and Fronts (1981), Heart of Darkness (1982), the Wall of Light series last seen in New York at the Metropolitan Museum in 2006, the Landline series last exhibited at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2018, and the Wadsworth Atheneum in 2019, to the more recent Wall Landlines, and the first Tower painting, a new series of monumental assemblage paintings started in 2024 and exhibited here for the first time.
