PRESENTATION: Sean Scully-Dark Yet

Over the last five decades, Sean Scully has developed a distinguished and prolific body of work through his distinct approach to contemporary abstraction. Shifting the paradigm in American abstraction from Minimalism and its reduced vocabulary, to an emotional form of abstraction, Scully’s practice offers a return to metaphor and spirituality as found in the European painting tradition. 

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Max Hetzler Archive

Spanning painting, drawing, sculpture and photography, Scully’s works capture both the tonality of the visual world and human experience. Scully incorporates his sense of physical dynamism with influences drawn from the legacy of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Henri Matisse and Piet Mondrian, resulting in works that are as monumental in scale as they are in emotional poignancy. Internationally Recognised as one of the most important painters of his generation, Scully has formulated his evolving definition of contemporary abstraction through painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture over the past five decades. Often using simple shapes to structure his works, the artist fuses personal influences with European tradition and American abstraction, grounding vast scale and gesture with visual delicacy and a sense of vulnerability. Comprising new paintings, drawings and aquatints, the exhibition “Dark Yet” presents works from important series including “Wall of Light” which has its origins in a watercolour from the 1980s and “Landlines”, ongoing since the late 1990s. Also included are more recently initiated hybrids of these, such as the “Wall Landlines” and ‘Nets and Cages”. The warm hued “Wall Red Blue” (2023), alongside the cooler “Wall Pinks Blue” (2023), are among the latest additions to Scully’s ‘Wall of Light’ series, in which the arranged blocks of colour almost, but not quite, touch. Reminiscent of delicate cracks in a wall, this allows for glimpses of the lighter pigment beneath the paint to seep through. Two works on aluminium from the ‘Landlines’ series, both painted this year, take up the artist’s fascination for the horizon lines separating sea, sky and land. The contrasting light, weight, texture and spirit of these elements forms a fundamental part of Scully’s approach to the composition of space and color. “Dark Yet 8.15.23” (2023), the monumental-scale work which gives the exhibition its title, belongs to the series of “Wall Landlines”. The work combines the horizontal bands from Scully’s earlier ‘Landlines’ works with an ‘inset’ – a painting within a painting – of the colored blocks typical of the ‘Wall of Light’ series. Insets have appeared in many of Scully’s multi-part constructions in the past forty years: the artist uses them to evoke a double experience, almost like a mother-child association, as well as a haptic composition which sits somewhere between painting and sculpture. Three drawings, one from each of the main series represented in the exhibition, accompany the paintings, showing the genesis of these often very large-scale works on a more intimate scale. The selection of works is completed by five aquatints, all from 2023. This printmaking technique produces lines and areas of tone which are painterly in appearance, thereby adapting the spirit and formal vocabulary of Scully’s paintings into etchings. Scully’s works draw directly from experience and nature, as much as from a sensitive receptivity for places, stories, human vulnerability, emotional nuances and vibrations of light. Questioning the prerequisites of abstraction – the aesthetics of pure form, pure surface and pure color – the artist emphasises the intrinsic value of artistic means which lies at the very centre of his work.

Inspired initially by the optical effects of Bridget Riley’s stripped patterns, Sean Scully’s early 1970s works presented a series of supergrid paintings featuring tight overlapping and precise linear patterns that revelled in their “musical” combination of color and light. The idea of marrying symmetry with expression went a long way to revive the fortunes of abstraction after a decade in which Pop Art had dominated. Once Scully had encountered Conceptual Art and Minimalism, he moved on from his aesthetic grid paintings to a more stripped-back style. He describes taking his work back to “ground zero” by which he meant a focus on the perfectly rendered stripe. The result was a unique series of works that aimed to use the stripe to stimulate in the viewer a pure spiritual experience. Even though Scully referred to the works as romantic and quasi-religious, his line paintings were very highly prized amongst the elite New York Minimalists who saw him as one of their own. Following a personal tragedy, Scully abandoned his meticulous line paintings for a style that featured a series of colored blocks and panels, applied through the thick application of paint. These melancholic works related more to the physical world and alluding (albeit obliquely) to the challenges and frailties of human relationships. Nick Orchard, Head of Modern British Art at Christie’s, suggested that these works “create [a sombre] mood in a way that no other painter has since Rothko”. Scully is associated with the concept of “floating paintings” which feature hand painted (imperfect) vertical stripes. Attached to the gallery wall by one edge, these works assume a middle ground somewhere between sculpture and painting. Refuting the idea that these pieces might be considered pure sculptures, Scully likened them rather to architectural illusions in that they asked the viewer to consider both the painting and the space that surrounded it. Indeed, these non-traditional, site-specific, “sculptures” saw the artist associated with the rise of Post-Minimalism.

Photo Left: Sean Scully, Net Blue, 2023, aquatint with sugarlift and spitbite on paper, 76.2 x 63.5 cm.; 30 x 25 in., 85.5 x 72.5 x 4.4 cm.; 33 5/8 x 28 1/2 x 1 3/4 in. (framed), edition 1 of 40, © Sean Scully, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Max Hetzler. Photo Right: Sean Scully, Net Green, 2023, aquatint with sugarlift and spitbite on paper, 76.2 x 63.5 cm.; 30 x 25 in., 85.5 x 72.5 x 4.4 cm.; 33 5/8 x 28 1/2 x 1 3/4 in. (framed), edition 1 of 40, © Sean Scully, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Max Hetzler

Info: Galerie Max Hetzler, Bleibtreustraße 45 & Bleibtreustraße 15/16, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 19/4-1/6/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.maxhetzler.com/