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Home , Sean Scully

Sean Scully , , 1945

Yellow Figure 2004 Watercolour 76 x 57 cm Inscription: “Yellow Figure / Sean Scully / 9.13.04”

Provenance: Galerie Lelong, Paris (W12277).

Sean Scully was born in Ireland in 1945 and grew up in London. He studied at Croydon College of Art (1965–1967) and at the University of Newcastle (1967–1971). In 1972, he won the Knox Fellowship to study art at the Harvard University, and in 1975, based on the merit of his early , Scully received a Harkness Fellowship, which allowed him to move to New York, where he lived many years, and eventually became an American citizen. In 1977, he had the opportunity to show his first solo exhibition in New York at the Duffy/Gibbs Gallery. In 1992, as a professor, he started a series of lectures at Harvard University.

He has exhibited worldwide: in Europe, America, and Asia, and he is represented in the permanent collections of numerous museums and public galleries, including the MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C., The Art Institute of Chicago, the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, the Gallery in London, the Irish in Dublin, and many other private and public collections. From 2006, the Dublin City Gallery —the — presents a permanent exhibition of his paintings.

This work is part of Scully’s Wall of Light series, that originated in a trip Scully took to Mexico in the early 1980s. In 1983, Sean Scully made the first of several influential trips to Mexico, where he used watercolor for the first time to paint works inspired by the patterns of light and shadows he saw on the stacked stones of ancient walls. He became fascinated with the surfaces of Mayan stone walls, which, animated by light, seemed to reflect the passage of time; he described the Maya as a “culture of walls and light.” The experience had a decisive effect on Scully’s work in general and led to the development of the Wall of Light series. In 1998, following additional trips to Mexico, and after absorbing the aesthetic implications of his earlier Mexico watercolors, Scully began to create his Wall of Light series of paintings, watercolors, pastels, and aquatints. It was Scully’s recollection of the spectacular light on the ancient walls in Mexico —so different from the fleeting, brooding light he grew up with in London— that most influenced this new body of work. Constructed with rectangular bricklike forms that fit closely together and are arranged in horizontal and vertical groupings, the paintings are characterised by broad brushstrokes, a wide range of luminous colors built up in layers, and varying degrees of light and darkness.

Like all of Scully’s work, in which the formal traditions of European painting are combined with forms of aesthetic experience rooted in American abstraction, they manifest a commitment to pure abstraction: to its emotional power, its storytelling potential, and, above all, its capacity to convey light. Despite their Mexican genesis, most of the paintings in the Wall of Light series spring from other lights and latitudes. Scully painted them in his studios in New York, , the countryside outside Munich, and London (through 2001). The individual works exhibit subtle differences of palette and tone, depending on the season and place in which they were created.

In 2005, displayed this series of works Wall of Light, then shown at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX; the Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH; and the Metropolitan Museum, NY.