Sean Scully

The work of Sean Scully (Dublin, 1945) shows the influence of Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko and Henri Matisse. While learning the trade of a typographer, he began his studies at the Central School of Arts in London and completed his training at the Croydon College of Art and Newcastle University. Since 1970, after his research into optical illusions, the perception of relief through series of structures and the feeling of movement produced by superposition, Scully has reduced his iconographic repertoire to a series of lines, stripes and blocks that have become typical of his work. He groups these elements in his painting in alternating fields and also constructs subtle monumental arrangements where the contrast between the figure and the background is neutralized. There is great craftsmanship in the treatment of colour in Scully’s work: the progressive superposition of thin layers of different pigments that are transparent and offer unique hues of great depth, endowing his abstract compositions with sensual warmth and emotion. The central theme of Scully’s painted work is the painting method: the artist builds a succession of thick layers of paint that accumulate to form intriguing colour effects. It is a pictorial process that can be reconstructed, particularly at the ends of the stripes where the contrasting colours meet. The paint is applied in damp layers with vertical upward and downward movements. The brush follows the form and underlining the layers helps determine the final colour. Sean Scully’s oeuvre has no determined meanings or unequivocal messages, but is open to all sorts of projections. The viewer has to see “inside” the work, just as the artist himself suggests. His painting is related to reality but it is not dominated by it. The artist certainly does not attempt to portray anything, and his work permits associations with landscapes and objects. Many of the large format works, often made up of several elements, evoke reminiscences of facades, buildings and ornaments. The principle of series and the principle of composition, the subordination of the parts to the whole, maintain a perfect balance. The exhibition we present at the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno has arrived in Valencia after travelling to the Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen in Dusseldorf, whose Director, Dr Armin Zweite, is the curator. The selection of works, which includes paintings, watercolours, drawings and photographs, concentrates exclusively on the last ten years of the artist’s creation, unlike all the other retrospective exhibitions of Sean Scully’s oeuvre. The catalogue, which reproduces all the works shown in the exhibition, also includes texts by the curator, Dr Armin Zweite, and by Bern Klüser, Francisco Jarauta and Maria Müller, as well as an interview with the artist by Hans-Michael Herzog.