Sean Scully

Sean Scully’s epic painting, Raphael, new paintings from the artist’s Wall of Light series and works on paper will be exhibited at Galerie Lelong. The exhibition will open to the public on Thursday, May 12 from 6 to 8 pm. The artist will be present at the opening.

For almost thirty years Sean Scully, at times single-handedly, has kept the tradition of abstract painting vital and renewed. Employing a vocabulary of horizontal and vertical forms that is deceptively reductive, the artist both humanizes and sanctifies the formal language of painting. Scully’s paintings envelop us physically with their internal structure and light. The artist’s recent paintings, known as the Wall of Light series, are inspired by and reference architecture and light and body and light, seeming opposites reconciled in the picture plane.

Raphael, a key painting in the show, is inspired by the classicism and break in tradition that the Italian painter represents, as Scully’s own work both carries on and defies the more contemporary tradition of Modernism. For Scully, painting represents one possibility of making visual essential human truths and connections. Relationships of color and edge mirror the complexity and vulnerability of human interrelationships. Duality is an essential truth of the human condition, and in Scully’s contrast of dark and light, of painted edge to painted edge, we see both harmony and fracture. The artist’s formal structure is a metaphor for difficulties and healings in human relationships, a mirror of experience, and a window into transcendent, but earthly spirituality. In a recent review in the London Guardian, Robert Clark wrote: "In his best work, one can physically sense the trajectory of the artist’s tentative intuitions and reflective uncertainty as they relate to compositional resolutions of the most exquisite precariousness."

Scully’s last exhibition of paintings in New York was in 2001. Since then he has had solo exhibitions at over ten museums internationally; among them are: Sara Hilden Art Museum in Tampere, Finland; Neues Museum Weimar, Germany; Centro Helio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia; and Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Cumbria, England. The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. is organizing a forthcoming survey of the artist’s Wall of Light paintings for Fall 2005. The exhibition will travel to the Cincinnati Museum of Art and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth before concluding at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 2006. The exhibition will be accompanied by a book, published by Rizzoli Press. In 2006, the MACRO in Rome will present a retrospective touring exhibition.

Pressetext

Sean Scully: New Work