The new partnership between the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill and New York City’s FLAG Art Foundation will launch on Sunday with “Ellsworth Kelly: Eight Decades,” which will remain on view through June 14. The focused survey spans more than 80 years of the artist’s work and brings together paintings, drawings, photographs, and a sculpture.
Consisting of roughly 20 works created between the 1940s and the 2010s, the exhibition includes key examples of Kelly’s mature minimalist work alongside early painting, plant drawings, and photographs made on the East End, where he visited and worked during two main periods: 1960-61 and 1968-69.
During the earlier time he created drawings of plants and flowers, sometimes incorporating varied shapes and colors. Later, he stayed in Bridgehampton, where he became interested in and photographed the hamlet’s potato barns and farm buildings.
Kelly (1923–2015) drew his distinctive formalist language from the world around him, according to the museum. From his early years, he was inspired by encounters with everyday objects: a window frame, a slab of butter, a petal’s edge — all of which 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 straight photography to monochromatic canvases and abstract sculptures that distill the effects of shape, color, and light.
“I want to capture some of that mystery in my work,” he once said. “In my paintings, I’m not inventing; my ideas come from constantly investigating how things look.”
The selection of works on view reveal the emergence of recurring motifs across mediums, says the museum, underscoring the artist’s sustained engagement with flattening form, negative space, and color reduced to its most elemental state.
“This important exhibition reveals the influence of our region on Kelly and marks a significant moment in the Parrish’s programmatic trajectory,” said Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, executive director of the 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.”
“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 FLAG. “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.”
“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, and Jonathan Rider, FLAG’s director, with Caroline Cassidy, FLAG’s deputy director.
Between 2026 and 2030, the museum and the foundation plan to collaborate on three exhibitions each year.
