Overview
De La Warr Pavilion is pleased to present the first survey exhibition in Europe of the work of American artist and gallerist, Betty Parsons (b. 1900, d. 1982, USA). Through a broad selection of paintings and sculptures made by the artist over a period of fifty years, the exhibition traces the trajectory of Parsons’ artistic career and her commitment to developing a bold, playful and expressive style.
Parsons is primarily known as the visionary New York gallerist who significantly shaped twentieth-century art in the US through her roster of artists including Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, and Clifford Still. Notably, through the Betty Parsons Gallery, she was one of the first to represent women, African American, Latin American, Asian and LGBTQ+ artists, such as Forrest Bess, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Agnes Martin, Roberto Matta, Kenzo Okada, and Alfonso Ossorio, providing them with crucial platforms early on in their careers with her open and freethinking approach.
Alongside her gallery career, Parsons maintained a rigorous artistic practice comprising painting and sculpture, working at weekends at her studio in Southold, Long Island. As she once observed in an interview: ‘When I’m painting in my studio over the weekends, I forget the gallery entirely.’ This exhibition focuses on the historical significance of Parsons’ parallel practice of making and her ongoing pursuit to capture the fleeting energy in her surroundings, which she described as the ‘sheer energy’ or ‘invisible presence’ of a situation.
Presented across both the Pavilion’s galleries, the exhibition explores Parsons’ fluid approach to medium and subject matter, including several early gouache works on paper, large-scale acrylic and oil paintings, and wooden sculptural works. The artist’s key influences ranged from natural and cosmic phenomena, such as ever- changing skies, oceans, and beach landscapes – to spirituality, as explored through her years-long involvement in the meditative organisation, Subud. Moreover, Parsons’ extensive travel across Europe, Africa, Japan and Mexico deeply enriched her relationship with colour and form, as she avidly recorded the world around her through watercolours, sketches, drawings and writings.
The coastal landscape of Long Island, New York, continued to be an important reference throughout Parsons’ life and is particularly reflected in the series of sculptures made using driftwood from the beaches near her studio during the 1970s and 1980s. These small, memento-like constructions transform found, natural materials and speak to the artist’s awareness of and support for ocean life and the environment in the later years of her life. Connecting to DLWP’s unique coastal location, the First floor gallery will be dedicated to a series of these sculptures, while downstairs, works on paper and canvas from the late 1930s until the year before Parsons’ death in 1982 will be displayed in dialogue with the beach view lying outside of the Ground floor gallery’s windows.
Arranged through a loose chronology, this survey exhibition highlights the cycles, returns and layers that are a fundamental part of the encounter with Parsons’ body of work. It is “the ‘sheer energy’, the ‘quality of life, vitality itself’” that unfolds across her dynamic and capacious oeuvre, as she captured not what a place or event ‘looked like, but what it made [her] feel’. Parsons’ is a practice that resists periodisation; rather, it privileges the role of spontaneity and intuition in channelling momentary glimmers within the present.
