The Parrish Art Museum will open two new exhibitions on Saturday that showcase work in different mediums, painting and photography, which engage in a dialogue with each other.
"Endless Limits: The Work of James Howell, 1962-2014" is the first career retrospective for the artist, who died in 2014, and the first time his work will be shown on Long Island, a region that profoundly shaped his practice.
"Time Exposed: Hiroshi Sugimoto's Seascapes" features 50 photographs by the artist, all drawn from the museum's permanent collection, thanks to a gift in 2022 from the Joy of Giving Something Foundation, a nonprofit committed to advancing the art of photography.
"While their approaches are distinct -- Sugimoto through photography and Howell through paintings and prints -- their practices converge in a definitive and personal meditation on infinity and the natural world," said Kaitlin Halloran, associate curator and publications manager. "We hope that by showing these works together, visitors will experience how two artists, working in different media, pursued parallel investigations into the intangible and the eternal."
Born in Kansas City, Mo., in 1935, Howell earned a B.A. in English Literature at Stanford University in 1957 and a Bachelor of Architecture degree there four years later.
By 1962 he decided to pursue his artistic practice, encouraged to work with acrylics, a new medium at the time, by Fairfield Porter, whom he met on visits to the East End. Howell considered their friendship a turning point in his artistic development. By 1968 he was primarily working abstractly.
Howell created a studio on San Juan Island, Wash., in 1983. His work was influenced by the island's infinitely shifting tones of gray sky, water, and light, resulting in a more neutral palette and loss of contrast. He moved to New York in 1992 and settled in 2006 in a house and studio in Montauk, where he continued to be inspired by fog, water, and sky.
"We wanted to be able to show the evolution of Howell's approach over the course of his 50-year career, from figurative painting into formless abstraction," said Scout Hutchinson, associate curator of exhibitions.
While the show includes several early figurative works, which reflect the influence of Porter, over the course of Howell's career his interests in mathematics and spiritual philosophies led to a reduced palette, and the defined edges of his compositions began to dissolve.
By the 90s, he had arrived at his signature "light into shadow" paintings. This led the artist to his "Series 10" in 1996, which would occupy him for the rest of his life. He pursued the subtleties of gray as he searched for the answer to his question, "What constitutes painting?"
The answer can be found in part in an extensive catalog essay by the art historian Alistair Rider. Of "Series 10" he wrote, "Its importance, in my mind, lies in the fact that it reflects a worldview in which there are no absolutes and no essences. Howell once wrote, for instance, that he was interested in 'dissolving oppositions.' . . . In his work, he steered clear of the binary extremities of pure black and absolute white. . . . He worked in the middle range, using countless pigment combinations that included both black and white."
"Endless Limits" will be accompanied by an illustrated catalog that features new scholarship on Howell's art with contributions by Ms. Halloran, Ms. Hutchinson, Jason Rosenfeld, and Mr. Sugimoto.
Tomorrow at 7 p.m., Laura Bardier, executive director of the James Howell Foundation, will discuss his work with Ms. Halloran and Ms. Hutchinson. Tickets are $20, $18 for senior citizens, $10 for members' guests, and free for students, children, and resident benefits pass holders.
Howell discovered Mr. Sugimoto's work in the 1990s and felt a kinship with the artist's meditative approach. It was the "Seascapes," black-and-white photographs of the ocean's horizon line, that particularly resonated.
Born in Tokyo in 1948, Mr. Sugimoto graduated from Saint Paul's University in that city before moving to Los Angeles, where he earned a degree from the Art Center College of Design in 1974. Since then he has been based in New York.
Mr. Sugimoto focuses on the passage of time within different scenes and has found a precise way to manipulate time and space. He began working on the "Seascapes" in 1980, traveling all over the world with a large-format camera and making exposures of various durations. The black-and-white images are all the same size, and bifurcated exactly in half by the horizon line.
In a statement about the series on his website, he says, "Water and air. So very commonplace are these substances, they hardly attract attention, and yet they vouchsafe our very existence. . . . Mystery of mysteries, water and air are right there before us in the sea. Every time I view the sea, I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing."
Mr. Sugimoto has received grants and honors from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the International Center of Photography, the Royal Photographic Society in London, and the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo.
"Endless Limits" has been organized by Ms. Halloran and Ms. Hutchinson. "Time Exposed" is organized by Ms. Halloran. Both exhibitions will run through Feb. 8.
