The Parrish Art Museum and The FLAG Art Foundation Present Ellsworth Kelly: Eight Decades
On View March 8–June 14, 2026
Opening March 14 | 2–4 PM
A focused survey of Kelly’s eight-decade career at the Parrish Art Museum
Water Mill, NY – February 17, 2026 – Marking the launch of a new partnership, the Parrish Art Museum and The FLAG Art Foundation present Ellsworth Kelly: Eight Decades, a focused survey spanning more than 80 years of the artist’s work. The exhibition brings together paintings, drawings, photographs, and sculpture in a concise survey on view at the Parrish Art Museum, March 8–June 14, 2026.
Comprising roughly twenty works created between the 1940s and the 2010s, the exhibition includes key examples of Kelly’s mature minimalist work alongside early paintings, plant drawings, and photographs made near the Parrish Art Museum on the East End of Long Island. The selection reveals the emergence of recurring motifs across mediums, underscoring Kelly’s sustained engagement with flattening form, negative space, and color reduced to its most elemental state. As Kelly observed toward the end of his life: “My later paintings have all the early paintings inside them.”
Ellsworth Kelly: Eight Decades marks the first iteration of a new partnership between The FLAG Art Foundation and the Parrish Art Museum. Between 2026 and 2030, the two organizations will collaborate on three exhibitions annually.
“Presenting a focused survey of eight decades of Ellsworth Kelly’s work provides a rare longitudinal view of the full range of his practice, offering insight into specific ideas and works, some inspired by the natural environment of the East End. This important exhibition reveals the influence of our region on Kelly and marks a significant moment in the Parrish’s programmatic trajectory,” said Dr. Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, Executive Director of the Parrish Art Museum. “We are incredibly excited to work with The FLAG Art Foundation on this exhibition and to launch our partnership with such a visionary and timely project, coinciding with the 250th anniversary of our nation. The exhibition demonstrates the ambitious projects our audiences can expect from this close collaboration, underscoring the power of partnership, creativity, and innovation to expand access to major art experiences both in this region and beyond, including New York City.”
The partnership builds on the recently established FRESH PAINT program, a rotating series of single-artwork exhibitions at the Parrish that began in June 2024. Signaling the deepening relationship between FLAG and the Parrish, this expanded collaboration also marks the growth of FLAG’s commitment to supporting contemporary art practices of all forms beyond its brick-and-mortar exhibition spaces in Manhattan.
“Building long-term relationships with artists is at the core of FLAG’s exhibition history and Ellsworth Kelly is someone who my wife and I were lucky enough to collect and get to know over the course of several decades,” said Glenn Fuhrman, Founder of The FLAG Art Foundation. “When FLAG began our conversations with Mónica about the many forms this partnership could take and the shows we could make together, Ellsworth was at the forefront of our thinking. Jack Shear, Ellsworth’s husband and the President of the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation—who I’ve known for an equally long time—was thrilled with the presentation and threw his full support behind the project.”
Ellsworth Kelly (American, 1923–2015). Blue Green Black Red, 1989, painted aluminum, 120 x 110 3/4 x 2 1/2 in. Ellsworth Kelly Studio. © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation.
American artist Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) drew his distinctive formalist language from the world around him. From his early years, he was inspired by his encounters with everyday objects: a window frame, a slab of butter, a petal’s edge—all offered fruitful
studies of how the eye perceives mass and color. From his observations emerged a surprisingly diverse body of work, ranging from figurative drawings and photography to monochromatic canvases and abstract sculptures that distill the effects of shape, color, and light. Fascinated by the way objects shift and transform based on perception, Kelly once stated: “I want to capture some of that mystery in my work. In my paintings, I’m not inventing; my ideas come from constantly investigating how things look.”
“Organized non-chronologically within the space of the Museum’s central gallery, the presentation of Kelly’s work encourages an associative viewing experience,” said Scout Hutchinson, The FLAG Art Foundation Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Parrish. “We hope this survey gives visitors the chance to see how ideas unfold across Kelly’s career and through different techniques and processes—how his interest in shadow and negative space, for example, appears in his early black-and-white photographs and resurfaces in later paintings and sculptures.”
More about Ellsworth Kelly and the exhibition here.
Ellsworth Kelly: Eight Decades, Programming:
• Saturday, March 14, Opening
2-4 PM | 2 PM Talk
Galleries open until 5 PM
• Friday, April 24, Curator Tour: 3 PM
• Saturday, June 14, Community Day | Curator Tours
Ellsworth Kelly: Eight Decades is organized by the Parrish Art Museum and The FLAG Art Foundation, in collaboration with Jack Shear, President of the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation. The exhibition is curated by Scout Hutchinson, The FLAG Art Foundation Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Parrish Art Museum, and Jonathan Rider, FLAG’s Director, with Caroline Cassidy, FLAG’s Deputy Director.
Exhibition Support
Ellsworth Kelly: Eight Decades is made possible, in part, thanks to the generous support of The FLAG Art Foundation. 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 Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly is regarded as one of the most important abstract painters, sculptors and printmakers of his time. Spanning eight decades, his career was marked by the independent route he took from any formal school or art movement and by his innovative contribution to twentieth-century painting and sculpture. Kelly drew on the connection between abstraction and nature from which he extrapolated forms and colors. From the beginning of his career, Kelly emphasized pure form and color. His impulse to suppress gesture in favor of creating spatial unity has played a pivotal role in the development of abstract art in America.
Kelly’s first one-man exhibition was at the Galerie Arnaud in Paris in 1951. His retrospective exhibitions include Ellsworth Kelly at The Museum of Modern Art in 1973; Ellsworth Kelly Recent Paintings and Sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1979; Ellsworth Kelly Sculpture in 1982 at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Saint Louis Art Museum; Ellsworth Kelly: A Retrospective in 1996 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Tate, London and the Haus der Kunst in Munich; Ellsworth Kelly Sculpture at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam in 2021; and Ellsworth Kelly at 100 at Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, and M7 of Qatar Museums, Doha in 2023.
About The FLAG Art Foundation
The FLAG Art Foundation is a non-collecting, nonprofit exhibition space that mounts solo, two-person, and thematic group exhibitions centering on emerging and established artists from around the globe. Organized by a diverse community of curators and thinkers within and beyond the art world, FLAG opened to the public in 2008 and has staged over 100 exhibitions celebrating the work of nearly 1,000 artists. Committed to providing education and resources for its surrounding community, and across New York City, all exhibitions and programs—including artist talks, artist-led workshops, and guided tours for school and museum groups—are free and open to the public.
The FLAG Art Foundation was founded by Glenn Fuhrman, an art patron and philanthropist, and alongside his wife Amanda, a Co-Founder of The Fuhrman Family Foundation. Fuhrman is a Trustee of New York-Presbyterian Hospital, New York, NY, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, and The Tate Americas Foundation, New York, NY, and is a Board Member of The Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, PA. He is also a Board Member of the 92nd Street Y, New York, and The Central Park Conservancy, New York, NY.
