“Tony Bechara: An Artist of Many Worlds” opened a few weeks ago at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York. The exhibition marks the first retrospective to span the full arc of the Puerto Rican painter’s 60-year career, from his 1970 Blinds series through works made in the final year of his life. Bechara passed away this past April on his 83rd birthday, and was best known for his shimmering grids of hand-painted quarter-inch squares and for his patronage of El Museo del Barrio, where he served as board chair for 18 years. The show, on view through November 1, was co-organized by Parrish executive director Mónica Ramírez-Montagut and associate curator Kaitlin Halloran, and arrives as part of the museum’s programming around the country’s semiquincentennial. We caught up with Ramírez-Montagut to hear about her friendship with the artist, and the dinner parties that made him a fixture of the East End.
Bechara gave the Parrish 19 Reds (2015) not long before his death last April. How did that gift come about?
Tony had already participated in the Parrish’s 2023 exhibition celebrating our 125th anniversary, for which we invited artists with deep ties to the East End, artists like Tony, who spent many of his summers in the Hamptons, to select works from the museum’s collection and place them in dialogue with their own.
Tony thoroughly enjoyed researching our collection and spending time in the vault. During our conversations, I casually remarked that it was a shame he was not represented in the Parrish’s permanent collection and suggested that he consider gifting us a painting so that his work would be represented in perpetuity alongside the artists who have shaped this region. Being that those artists include William Merritt Chase, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Malcolm Morley and many artists that he admired, he was tempted!
“Tony Bechara: An Artist of Many Worlds“
Artists: Tony Bechara
Venue: Parrish Art Museum
Address: 279 Montauk Hwy, Water Mill, NY 11976
Through: November 1, 2026
Tony loved the Parrish and was genuinely excited about the direction of the museum during my tenure, so he had many reasons to make such a gift. He invited me to his studio to choose a painting, and I selected a large, vibrant, luminous and scintillating work that immediately captivated me. In fact, I hung it in my office for some time before “lending” it to the exhibition.
You’ve noted that it’s often “not helpful when a director is curating,” yet you co-organized this survey with Kaitlin Halloran. What made you want to take it on directly?
When museum directors curate exhibitions, it can, on occasion, overshadow the outstanding work of the museum curators. I am certainly guilty of that myself.
In this case, however, Tony was a dear friend, a role model and a mentor. His passing came as a profound shock. Much of my success at the Parrish is due to his unwavering encouragement, thoughtful advice and willingness to lend a friendly ear. For that reason, I felt I had to play a role in organizing his exhibition.
I invited my colleague, Associate Curator Kaitlin Halloran, to serve as co-curator. Kaitlin is a rising star, and she brought tremendous scholarly rigor, meticulous research and curatorial expertise to the project. I brought my heart; she brought the scholarship. Together, it was the perfect combination.
This is billed as the first comprehensive survey of Bechara’s 60-year career, though his work sits in the Met and the Brooklyn Museum and he chaired El Museo del Barrio for 18 years. Why did it fall to the Parrish to stage his first major survey?
There have been other surveys of Tony’s work, but this is the first retrospective to span the full arc of his artistic career. It includes some of his earliest paintings, such as the Blinds series from 1970, created shortly after his studies at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and extends through works made during the final year of his life in 2025.
The exhibition traces Tony’s evolution as an artist, following his journey from figuration to abstraction and revealing the moment he discovered the distinctive visual language and artistic vocabulary that would define his remarkable career.
Your training is in architecture, and Bechara built his paintings on an orthogonal grid drawn from Ravenna’s mosaics and the tilework of the Alhambra. How did that background shape your reading of his method?
It is fascinating that once Tony established his method, using the orthogonal grid of ¼-inch by ¼-inch squares as the guiding principle for all his compositions in the early and mid-1970s, he spent the rest of his career exploring the endless possibilities contained within that seemingly rigid structure.
He experimented with an extraordinary range of permutations and variations: from compositions that appeared to feature completely random distributions of color across the canvas, to works incorporating recognizable patterns, to patterns so dispersed that they again seemed almost unpredictable. He also created pixelated, psychedelic swirls and mesmerizing monochromes composed of countless hues and tonal variations, giving the surfaces a shimmering, almost vibrating quality.
The ability to generate an infinite number of compositions from a limited set of parameters is something Tony’s work shares with architecture, as you mention. It is often through forced “restrained sensibility,” Tony called it, that constraints and a defined set of rules push artists and architects to be their most inventive, creative and resourceful.
The press release says Bechara’s abstraction elicits “a dialogue with the Declaration of Independence’s assertion of ‘the pursuit of happiness,’” noting that it is “a language of both self-determination and inclusion.” How does non-representational work engage with these prosaic ideas?
Through his use of the grid, Tony discovered a strategy in which a seemingly strict structure, one that provides order to chaos, could simultaneously allow for difference, variation and randomness to flourish. I find Tony’s compositional approach to be a powerful metaphor for this anniversary. His grid creates a sense of order, or “union,” while also serving as the foundation upon which distinct and disparate colors (or individuals) can emerge, interact and shine. Each individual element maintains its own identity while contributing to a cohesive, harmonious and ultimately inspiring whole.
In his paintings and colorful grids, Tony achieved a deeply personal form of self-expression while also embracing the vast cultural influences gathered throughout his world travels. His work embodies a strategy for the coexistence of past and present and presents compositions in which many different elements can come together, retain their individuality and still function as a unified and harmonious entity. To me, that is ultimately one of the great achievements and aspirations of the United States: creating a framework where many voices, cultures and perspectives can coexist while contributing to a larger, shared whole.
The Parrish focuses on artists of the East End, and the wall text notes Bechara’s long stays in the Hamptons. What was his connection to this region? What did the Hamptons give him?
The summers in the East End are renowned for bringing together some of the most influential thought leaders in the arts, culture and financial worlds. This unique convergence of creative and intellectual energy has made the community an extraordinarily desirable place to be part of. Tony was not only a participant in these circles; he was at the center of many of these gatherings.
The summers in the East End provided Tony with the perfect environment to host his weekly dinners, reminiscent of the salon gatherings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where artists, writers, thinkers and cultural figures came together to exchange ideas. Historically, many artistic movements and intellectual currents were nurtured through these conversations, and Tony understood the power of bringing people together around a table. His dinners became contemporary salons, gatherings where friendships were formed, ideas were shared and a creative community was continuously renewed.
Whatever the Hamptons gave Tony, he returned tenfold through his generosity, his friendships, his hospitality and his unwavering commitment to the arts and to bringing people together. Tony was not simply part of the Hamptons; he was one of the individuals who helped make the Hamptons the vibrant cultural community it is today.
Bechara mapped his “pixels” by hand from the early 1970s, long before the digital connotation existed. How do you present that analog, hand-labored practice as something inventive to be admired, when your current audience now reads every grid as a screen?
It is interesting because visitors are not experiencing these works as simple pixels or digital grids. Tony’s paintings are deceptively complex: they appear to be one thing when viewed from a distance (or on a digital screen) and reveal themselves as something entirely different when encountered up close and in person. In my opinion, there is also a sense of humor embedded in their elements of surprise and unpredictability that is often absent from our digital culture.
When approached closely, the paintings transform into tactile, sensory and sensual experiences. The obsessive mark-making, through which one can feel the texture and presence of every single tiny square, reflects an extraordinary dedication of time, discipline and intimate labor. Combined with the optical illusions these countless gestures create, this meticulous process results in a deeply moving experience for the viewer.
Ultimately, digital pixels and screens cannot create the “fields of moods or temperatures” that Tony was exploring. Beyond the visual experience of each individual work, visitors are able to grasp the artist’s larger vision and personal journey, which is what makes this exhibition so powerful. This is what we have witnessed in our visitors’ responses: a genuine emotional connection not only to the work itself, but also to the creative process and to the life journey of the artist.
By presenting the complete arc of Tony’s artistic journey, the works, the process and the life behind them, we are able to reframe the exhibition experience for today’s digital-native audiences. We remind visitors that art is not simply an image to be viewed, but an encounter: a relationship with materiality, human creativity and the unique story embedded within every work.
There is still nothing in the world that compares to the experience of standing before a great painting—the possibility of transcendence that can emerge through these pictorial portals, such as the ones Tony created throughout his extraordinary career.
