Sean Scully – Artist

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In our 10-20-06 ARTSCAPE interview, Sean Scully discusses Sean Scully: Wall of Light, which was presented from September 26, 2006 through January 15, 2007 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. He also discusses

• Metaphysics, mysticism, and alchemy
• His process
• Piet Mondrian and Ellsworth Kelly
• The issue of nuance in painting
• Spirituality in painting

Sean Scully, born in Dublin in 1945, grew up in a working-class neighborhood of south London. He learned typesetting and graphic design as an apprentice in a commercial printing shop in his late teens, and then studied painting at Croydon College of Art, London, and Newcastle University. He discovered the work of Mark Rothko and Bridget Riley, and switched from figurative work to abstraction. After a trip to Morocco in 1969, Scully incorporated the bright light of North Africa and the stripes of local textiles into his work. A year’s fellowship at Harvard University brought him to the United States for the first time in 1972; a second fellowship in 1975 allowed him to settle in New York, and he became an American citizen in 1983.

After coming to the U.S., Mr. Scully retained but simplified the stripes that characterized his earlier work: Moroccan color and pattern gave way to almost monochromatic paintings. In the early 1980s, Scully reintroduced color, space, and texture, through the application of multiple layers of paint, and thereby added an expressive element. He began experimenting with compositional and structural concepts that led him to break out of the two-dimensional picture plane, creating asymmetrical assemblages that take on a sculptural quality.

By the mid-1980s, Mr. Scully’s work had garnered international recognition, and many major museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, began to acquire his paintings. His work was included in The Museum of Modern Art’s 1984 exhibition An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture. The following year, the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh organized the first major exhibition of his work in the U.S., which traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Four years later, his work was the subject of a major solo exhibition in Europe that originated at London’s Whitechapel Gallery and traveled to Madrid and Munich.

During this time, the aesthetic lessons of his Mexico visits, and the early watercolors they inspired, germinated quietly; in 1998 they burst forth in a new series of works, showcased in this exhibition. The Wall of Light works rely on two main formal elements: the vertical and the horizontal bar. Yet, the surface texture and the space between the forms create fascinating, highly complex structures. Some of the works evoke such architectural elements as bricks, post-and-lintel construction, even the hulking structure of Stonehenge. The spaces between the blocks frequently reveal the underlying colors and read as light shining between the bricks of a wall. The rectangles are often built up with several rich layers of color, and the broad, gestural brushstrokes emphasize the presence of the artist’s hand.

Sean Scully: Wall of Light is the first U.S. museum presentation of Mr. Scully’s Wall of Light series and began its national tour at The Phillips Collection, followed by showings at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Cincinnati Art Museum. The Metropolitan has had a commitment of more than 20 years to the work of Sean Scully. In 1985, it became the first U.S. museum to acquire his work, with his painting Molloy (1984).