ART CITIES:London-Sean Scully

Born in Dublin in 1945, Sean Scully has gained international prominence as one of the most admired contemporary abstract painters working today. Fusing the traditions of European painting with the distinct character of American abstraction, Scully’s great achievement is the reinvigoration of abstract painting with the metaphorical, the philosophical and the sublime, combined with the earthy tangibility of paint.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Blain|Southern Gallery Archive

Featuring large-scale, multi-panel paintings, as well as works on paper, sculpture and a group of his celebrated “Landline” paintings, the exhibition “Uninsideout” offers an overview of Sean Scully’s multi-faceted oeuvre. Known for combining the geometry of European concrete art with the ethereality of American abstraction, Scully’s thick, gestural brushstrokes over grids of stripes and squares evoke the energy and beauty of the natural world. His “Landline” paintings are largely inspired by his years in Ireland, particularly his time looking out to the sea. In these moments, he saw the layers of the world pressed into the space in front of him, forming the stacks that would come to characterize this series. The expressive and unconstrained bands of color reach beyond abstraction and into the sublime, where the contours of landscapes unfold to reveal the physical and emotional dimensions of experience, trauma and memory. According to Scully, “I was always looking at the horizon line, at the way the end of the sea touches the beginning of the sky, the way the sky presses down on the sea and the way that line, that relationship, is painted”. Since 2016, Scully has taken to painting on both aluminium and copper. Responding to paint in different ways, each support creates a rhythm and tempo of its own. This choice of polished surface also connects with the artist’s interest in how his art can absorb and reflect meaning from and to the viewer. Scully began his career as an artist in London in the 1960s and achieved early commercial success in the 1970s with his paintings of brightly colored, hard-edged bands and lines, inspired by American Minimalism. By 1982 Scully had relocated to New York City, where he held a professorship at Parsons School of Art and was living and working on a floor of a former textile factory in Tribeca. Using old boards he rescued from his loft’s industrial past, Scully began to create deep, sculptural stretcher frames, painting both the fronts and sides of the resulting object-like canvases. He then combined multiple canvases of varying sizes and depths into single pictures. In these multipanel constructions, Scully abandons the pure, bright colors of his 1970s paintings in favor of a moodier, more nuanced palette. He replaces the clean, rigid lines of his earlier work with softly overlapping, Scully structures his compositions with geometric shapes reminiscent of architectural motifs, such as doors and windows, bricks and stones.  In the 1990s Scully embarked on his “Wall of Light” paintings. Taking inspiration from a visit to Mexico in the early 1980s, Scully began to replace the precise stripes of his earlier pieces with blocks of color, building them with increasingly loose and feathered brushstrokes into irregular structures that imply both strength and impermanence. In more recent years the artist has returned to sculpture, working with Corten and stainless steel to produce powerful structures that both assert and subvert their materiality.

Info: Blain|Southern Gallery, 4 Hanover Square, London, Duration: 3/10-17/11/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 10:00-17:00, www.blainsouthern.com