Sean Scully: The Parrish Museum

Installation, Sean Scully at The Parrish Museum, 2025. 

By MICHAEL KLEIN August 13, 2025

His program is twofold: color and structure. Mathematically simple, but his program opens the door to infinite varieties and formal possibilities. This show is the evolution of a contemporary painter now renowned. As evident from the selection of paintings on view, made to quote from the museum’s website: 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.”  

Moving from his urban life to a country setting had a huge impact on his thinking and work. Shifting in scale and material, Scully collected scraps of wood rather than using stretched canvas. The small works, like talisman small gems, one such work is Solomon, 1982, a simple pattern of black and white vertical stripes. In these and others of the period, Scully exploited the Minimal passion for repetition, and that passion has found its place in all of his work from the 80s until today. 

Overall, the paintings always have a distinct architectonic presence as if a wall of many colors. Vertical or horizontal bands of color, there is always internal repetition, a visual rhyme if you will, that animates the surface, capturing the viewer’s attention. He builds in sections, and sometimes these sections become layered so a grid pattern can be inserted into or over a band of colors. And while the elements of structure are explored, color becomes a means to an emotional expression, a way to capture the viewer’s heart.  

Scully today commands the same presence as the great Stellas of the Sixties; Scully paintings are large, even monumental in scale, but always a very well-balanced and harmonious scheme of color. Typical of this methodology is an early work comprised of twelve separate canvases, Backs and Fronts, 1981. It is a big statement and indicative of what is to come over the next few years, a constant interpretation of a basic scheme of color and line. 

His career, now over four decades, shows no sign of exhaustion or repetition but an ongoing investigation into this long-established vocabulary. Again, like Stella or even Robert Mangold, there is endless exploration and invention. The focus is on key geometric elements present in all the works, paintings, prints, or his pastels. A statement by the artist in his retrospective catalogue from the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2020 underscores this working methodology: “…the only thing I could not bear to get rid of was the basic structural element - the band, line stripe, whatever. That repetitive visual structure - I really connect with very deeply.”  

Installation, Sean Scully at The Parrish Museum, 2025.

While the format he uses remains constant, there are seemingly endless combinations of color and hues that are explored and examined for their power. This is seen in the Wall of Light series, exemplified in this exhibition by Wall of Light Oceanic, 2005. This series explores muted hues patterned in a grid format, but the overall appearance is less structured, and the paintings have the feel of loose-fitting color bricks, and color defines mood. 

The architectonic element continues as suggested by the title “wall,” but it is a wall weathered, modulated, and nuanced by light. The subtle color variations in this series produce a certain meditative power as if this were a spiritual wall, not a proper wall. The more sensorial character of his paintings continues into the series shown in Venice in 2015, Land Sea. Stunning and brilliant works, more loosely painted with palettes that remind this viewer of Edouard Manet, another picture maker who spent a year painting in Venice two centuries earlier. Here, he has moved beyond the wall to reflect on the natural elements of land, sea, and air. 

Throughout his career, Scully has explored and used the grid as the bones of his paintings, thin or thick; colorful or muted tones, even simple black and white lines or thick painterly strokes, as in the Land Sea series. From this formula, he has and continues to create dramatic abstract works. And as the critic Rosalind Krauss wrote in her essay called “Grids” in 1979, the grid is an emblem of modernity by being just that: the form that is ubiquitous in the art of our century. The Scully grid organizes his thoughts, his feelings, and ultimately his vision. It is the structure upon which he can build and paint and bring forth in endless variety and depth the simple beauty of color and line. The latest work, Tower, 2024, takes us in a new direction, whereby painted canvases are now layered so the picture is a relief, a full geometric construction. It's as if Scully has taken Picasso’s Cubism and made the suggestion and illusion of three-dimensional space very real and genuinely dynamic. This show of some 70 works is a wonderful display of both Scully’s imagination and boundless energy. 

A nod to the playwright Edward Albee for his support of visual artists, I only wish more successful artists, no matter their profession, took their success and used it to help and support others in such a way: providing the space, time, and freedom to create. WM