'Sean Scully: The Albee Barn, Montauk’ at The Parrish Art Museum, New York, USA

22 April 2025

From 11 May – 21 September 2025, The Parrish Art Museum presents ‘Sean Scully: The Albee Barn, Montauk’, a survey of the artist’s work ranging from 1981 to 2024, exploring his Long Island connection. The exhibition documents 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 colour 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.

Find out more via The Parrish Art Museum.

Image: Sean Scully, Elder, 1982, oil on board, 18 x 15 in. © Sean Scully.