Sean Scully’s ‘Montauk’ series returns to East End of Long Island

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 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. The presentation can be seen from May 11 through September 21, 2025.

“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,” Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, Executive Director of the Parrish Art Museum, said. “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 features over 70 works spanning 1981 to 2024, telling the story of Scully’s extraordinary life and how far-reaching that experience of nature would become. 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, Sean 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. In total, Sean Scully: The Albee Barn, Montauk features over 70 works, 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.

About Sean Scully

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.

The last five years have been marked by the major fifty-year career retrospective Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in the USA, 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, New York, July 2024 – 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.