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 to June 14.
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. 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.”