ART-PRESENTATION: Sean Scully-PAN
While known primarily for his large-scale abstract paintings, comprised of vertical and horizontal bands, tessellating blocks and geometrical forms comprised of gradated and shifting colors, Sean Scully also works in a variety of diverse media, including printmaking, sculpture, watercolor and pastel. Having developed a style over the past five decades that is uniquely his own, Scully has cemented his place in the history of painting.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Lisson Gallery Archive
Sean Scully’s work synthesises a thoroughly international collection of influences and personal perspectives – ranging from the legacy of American abstraction, with inspiration from the likes of Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, and that of European tradition, with nods to Henri Matisse and Piet Mondrian, as well as references to classical Greek architecture. While monumental in scale and gesture, Scully’s work retains an undeniable delicacy and sincerity of emotion. Sean Scully’s solo exhibition “PAN” span both New York spaces of Lisson Gallery, featuring new paintings, large-scale sculpture and works on paper at 24th Street and a focus on the artist’s longstanding, but lesser known relationship to figuration at Tenth Avenue. Scully debuts a new multi-panel painting, “Shutter” (2019), measuring over 214 cm wide. Painted in his signature striped style, which he developed over many years following a visit to Morocco in the late 1960s, the four-part work with alternating bands of reds, blues, greens, oranges, pinks and yellows exemplifies the artist’s energetic brushstroke. Alongside this monumental painting is a diptych, “Vice Versa Green” (2019), in which vibrant blocks of abstract color are inset from one panel into another, forming a bold and alluring contrast. These paintings are in dialogue with four blue Landlines, Scully’s now iconic series which feature only horizontal stripes and are inspired by nature’s horizon line, where, as he describes, there is the “elemental coming together of land and sea, sky and land…endlessly beginning and ending”. Landlines have become the formal catalyst for most of Scully’s recent work, and the exhibition also features paintings from the series on a more intimate scale. “Shadow Stack”, a large-scale sculpture made of corten steel, further adapts the Landline motif, where the stacked industrial elements provide a three-dimensional representation of the paintings’ gestural lines. As a student in the 1960s, Sean Scully was looking to the German Expressionist painters and French painting of the early 20th Century and as such, his earliest works were representational, often portraits rendered in graphite, charcoal or pastel. Describing the relationship of this work to his abstract paintings, Scully notes: “I am one of a small number of artists whose abstraction is based, in some way, on the memory of figuration”. The exhibition at Lisson Gallery’s Tenth Avenue space includes a selection of these rare early works on paper with Scully’s latest paintings, which return to his figurative origins. Madonna paintings, based on photographs taken of his family at the beach, are on view alongside a large-scale diptych, “Boy Land” (2019), where one panel contains the familiar horizontal lines of the Landline series and the other is an image of his son playing in the sand, deftly drawn but retaining the loose gesture as fluid as the lines of the abstract paintings. In the center of the gallery is a sculpture, “Ten Ton Ceiling” (2017), in which standard dropped ceiling tiles from the artist’s studio were cast in bronze and stainless steel, creating a conceptual “portrait” of the artist.
Info: Lisson Gallery, 504 West 24th Street, New York and Lisson Gallery, 138 Tenth Avenue, New York, Duration 30/4-8/6/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.lissongallery.com
