Sean Scully
Return, 2007
Oil on linen
85 x 74 - 3/4 inches
216 x 190 cm
Irish artist Sean Scully is one of the leading abstract painters of his generation. Both embracing and defying traditions established by twentieth century modernists, Scully employs a deceptively reductive vocabulary of horizontal and vertical bands of color and interplays of light and shadow to communicate a duality of harmony and fracture that mirrors the vulnerability of the human condition. In the works Return (2007) and Red Unfolding (2009), the paintings are divided almost sculpturally into panels separated by color and brush-work. Bold swaths of oil paint align to create a unified configuration, but within the seams of each color block, underlying tones emerge to produce subtle variations which cause the colors to pulse and vibrate. Scully’s work has been the subject of numerous solo museum exhibitions including recent shows at the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery in Washington D.C. and the Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, Wisconsin. Recent group exhibitions include shows at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin; and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. In 2012, the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland and the Lentos Kunstmuseum in Linz, Austria, will host a retrospective of Scully’s work in addition to a solo show of the artist’s seminal drawings from the 1970s traveling throughout the United Kingdom and United States.