Now on view through 14 June 2026, Ellsworth Kelly: Eight Decades presents a survey of the extraordinary career of Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) at the Parrish Art Museum. Widely regarded as one of the most influential voices in postwar abstraction, Kelly devoted his life to conceptually redefine painting.

Bringing together around twenty works produced between the 1940s and the 2010s, the exhibition traces Kelly’s sustained investigation of form, colour, and perception. From his early years in Paris, where he absorbed lessons from architecture, Romanesque art, and chance encounters with everyday visual phenomena, to his later shaped canvases and luminous panels, Kelly consistently sought to strip painting down to its essentials. His plant drawings, photographs of the East End of Long Island, and bold monochrome reliefs reveal an artist deeply attentive to the world around him, translating observed fragments of reality into distilled, abstract compositions.

Rather than staging a comprehensive retrospective, Eight Decades focuses on pivotal moments in Kelly’s development. Recurring concerns, the flattening of form, the dynamic tension between positive and negative space, and the expressive potential of pure, unmodulated colour, appear across decades and media. Kelly’s innovation lay not in expressive gesture but in restraint: he eliminated illusionism and narrative to reveal the immediate sensory impact of shape.

Organised in partnership with The FLAG Art Foundation and curated by Scout Hutchinson and Jonathan Rider, the exhibition inaugurates a new collaboration between the Parrish and FLAG, underscoring a shared commitment to historically grounded yet forward-looking presentations.

Ellsworth Kelly: Eight Decades offers a rare opportunity to encounter the disciplined elegance and quiet intensity of an artist whose exploration of colour and form reshaped the trajectory of modern art. His influence continues to resonate across generations of painters, sculptors, and designers.