Over the last five decades, Sean Scully (b. 1945) 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. 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.
Scully’s abstract compositions are evocative of architectural structures as much as forms in nature: horizon lines, meeting points between earth and sky, rock formations, nature and buildings. ‘I’m trying to turn stone into light,’ he explains of his practice. Often comprised of coloured blocks, stripes or bands arranged on horizontal and vertical axes, these seemingly solid bricks of colour allow light to creep in through the cracks, grounding vast scale and gesture with a visual delicacy and sense of vulnerability.
‘The freedom Scully had sought in abstract painting to communicate the richness of experience – of memory and emotion – compelled him to also find a way to invest it with metaphor, to endow it with a narrative structure, and to connect it with the world. This was the crux of his argument with what he saw as the hermetic and self-referential nature of Minimalism, concluding that the movement had lost its energy and its sense of direction.’
T. Rub, in Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020
