Betty Parsons's solo exhibition, Betty Parsons at De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, United Kingdom, will be on view October 4, 2025–January 4, 2026.
De La Warr Pavilion's press release follows:
Betty Parsons (b. 1900, d. 1982, USA) is best-known as a visionary New York gallerist who significantly shaped twentieth-century art in the US through her roster of artists including Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman, Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock. Alongside her gallery career, Parsons maintained a rigorous artistic practice of painting and sculpture, working at weekends in her Long Island studio.
Parsons developed a bold, playful, and expressive style, with influences ranging from natural phenomena and the cosmos to spirituality. Extensive travel across Europe, Africa, Japan, and Mexico deeply enriched her relationship with colour and form, while the coastal landscape of Long Island, New York inspired her pursuit of capturing fleeting energy in her surroundings, which she described as the ‘sheer energy’ or ‘invisible presence’ of a situation. In the 1970s, Parsons began sculpting, using driftwood from the beaches near her studio to create small, memento-like constructions. This coastal setting also inspired her poetry, which filled her sketchbooks alongside watercolours of the landscape.
This will be the first survey of Parsons’ work in Europe, charting the trajectory of her artistic practice through painting, sculpture and poetry.
