"These are extremely conceptual paintings. They’re as stripped down as can be before you have to leave painting. I was right at the edge of painting…"
—Sean ScullySean Scully’s duotonal Untitled, 1977, dates to the artist’s period of hard edge, acrylic painting. Reducing painting to the most economical of forms, the present work exemplifies the artist’s output during a crucial engagement with Minimalism and Conceptualism. Arriving in New York in the fall of 1975 at the height of these artistic movements, Scully shifted to producing more linear, simplified works in a departure from his earlier grid-based compositions.
Untitled engages with ideas that would ostensibly be antagonistic to Scully’s emotional approach to painting. Inspired by minimalist musicians such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich, Scully emphasized the senses of pulsation and rhythm in striped compositions. Scully has recalled works from this time as “very willful and procedural, ritualistic and peculiar in the way that they were made.”1 Utilizing tape to cover proportioned areas of the canvas, Scully built up the surface with two distinct layers of paint that create a subtle, sculptural quality. Honing on this textural quality, Scully has also affirmed that these works remain romantic and painterly. Instead of eschewing the materiality of paint like some other artists were doing at the time, Scully scaled back his use of acrylic to highlight its minute dimensionality. With this emphasis on rhythm and the physical aspect of painting, Untitled retains an unmistakable “Scully-ean” quality, uniquely conserved through the artist’s engagement with Minimalist forms.
