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.
A fully illustrated corresponding exhibition catalog published by Hatje Cantz will include two interpretive essays, an interview with Scully, a complete plate section, a detailed chronology, and an essay on the role The Edward F. Albee Foundation has played with artists through the years.
Sean Scully: The Albee Barn, Montauk is organized by Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, Executive Director, with Kaitlin Halloran, Associate Curator and Publications Manager.
Exhibition Support
Sean Scully: The Albee Barn, Montauk is presented with the generous support of Northern Trust, and Fiona & Eric Rudin. We are also grateful for the support of Lisson Gallery; Catherine and Bill Carmody; Susan and Timothy Davis; Yanina Fuertes; Linda Hackett and Melinda Hackett/ CAL Foundation; Amy and Steven Horowitz; Sandy and Stephen Perlbinder; Herman Goldman Foundation; Martha McLanahan; Robin and Frederic Seegal; Alexandra Stanton and Sam Natapoff; Sedgwick A. Ward; and Jennifer Rice and Michael Forman.
The Parrish Art Museum’s programs are made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and by the property taxpayers from the Southampton School District and the Tuckahoe Common School District.
About Sean Scully
Sean Scully’s (Irish, b. 1945) work is in the collection of virtually every major museum around the world. In 2014 he became the first Western artist to have a career-length retrospective in China. He was awarded the International Artist of the Year Prize in Hong Kong in 2018. His important solo exhibitions include Landline at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., which traveled to the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; Landline and Other Works, De Pont Museum, Tilburg, Netherlands; Sea Star, National Gallery, London; the retrospective Vita Duplex, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Germany; and a presentation of sculptures at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, England. Among other exhibitions are: Eleuthera, new figurative paintings shown at the Albertina, Vienna; the retrospective Long Light at the Villa e Collezione Panza, Varese, Italy; and Human, paintings and sculptures presented at San Giorgio Maggiore for the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. His first exhibition in central Europe, Passenger, at the Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest, traveled to the Benaki Museum, Athens, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb.
A fifty-year career retrospective, Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas, was organized and shown at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, his exhibitions have included Material World, Thorvaldsens Museum, Copenhagen; Painting and Sculpture, Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej, Toruń, Poland; Song of Color, Langen Foundation, Neuss, Germany; and A Wound in a Dance with Love, Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna. Scully lives and works between New York, Bavaria, and Aix-en-Provence.
