Betty Parsons: Sheer Energy

About

Throughout her career, Betty Parsons (1900 – 1982) created an extensive body of paintings and sculptures characterised by their bold, playful and expressive style. Sheer Energy is the first institutional survey exhibition of her work in Europe and traces the trajectory of her practice across five decades, from the 1930s to the 1980s.

Parsons is primarily known as the visionary New York gallerist who significantly shaped twentieth-century art in the US through the Betty Parsons Gallery. Alongside her gallery career, Parsons maintained a rigorous artistic practice, working at weekends at her studio in Southold, Long Island. As she once observed in an interview: 'When I'm painting in my studio…I forget the gallery entirely.' This exhibition focuses on Parsons' parallel practice of making and her ongoing pursuit to capture the fleeting qualities of her surroundings, which she described as the 'sheer energy' or 'invisible presence' of a situation.

Arranged through a loose chronology across both the Pavilion's galleries, this 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, 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.

Betty Parsons: Sheer Energy is curated by Joseph Constable, Head of Exhibitions, De La Warr Pavilion, and is realised in collaboration with The Betty Parsons and William P. Rayner Foundation, represented by Alison Jacques, London, and Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

READ MORE: https://www.dlwp.com/exhibition/betty-parsons/

Image credit: Betty Parsons, Circles, 1967, Acrylic on canvas, 117 x 239 x 6 cm, 46 x 94 1/8 x 2 3/8 in, framed. Courtesy Alison Jacques, and Alexander Gray Associates, New York. © The Betty Parsons Foundation. Photo: Michael Brzezinski.