Sean Scully - 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale London Thursday, October 12, 2023 | Phillips

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  • ‘‘My work is not what you would call expressionism. It’s geometry painted expressively’’ 
    —Sean Scully

    Untitled is an intimately scaled, poignantly emotional and spiritual work of art. Painted in 1990, the present work belongs to Scully’s rich and celebrated body of ‘grid’ paintings of which a comparable work of the same palette and year is held in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection in New York. Distinctive in its size, Untitled perfectly encapsulates the artist’s opinion, ‘art though, in our attempt to create our own nature, it’s a terrible, ridiculous and profoundly beautiful arrogance. And nothing is more arrogant than a small painting.’i

     

    Untitled is elegant in its geometric simplicity – four grids of vertical and horizontal rectangular forms coalesce on the canvas – and its charcoal black and silver grey palette. Underlaid by a rust-red primer, the strips of black and grey are suffused with emotional warmth, permeating these diaphanous forms with familiarity and intimacy. By 1981, the artist had abandoned acrylic paint and hard-edged abstraction in favour of oil paint and expressive abstraction. In Untitled, the artist’s hand is now present in its raw and gestural vitality. Scully’s prowess as a painter can be crystalised as his translation of the cool, hard geometry and cerebral theory of the abstract tradition into a deeply human art, one imbued with untethered visceral emotion.

    ‘‘Abstraction is the art of our age; it’s breaking down of certain structures, an opening up. It allows you to think without making obsessively specific references, so that the viewer is free to identify with the work. Abstract art has the possibility of being incredibly generous, really out there for everybody. It’s a nondenominational religious art. I think it’s the spiritual art of our time’’
    —Sean Scully

    Part of his Wall of Light series, Untitled is a testament to the duality present in Scully’s tessellated abstract oeuvre. ‘The divided soul is what created pain and beauty’, is how the Irish poet W. B. Yeats described his perception of every artist’s personal duality.ii For Scully, this is the vita duplex, a reference to the conflicting forces within his work, the collision between the ‘refined’ and the ‘brutal and crude’.iii Untitled is refined in its strict geometric structure, brutal in its rough texture and crude in its soft contouring.

     

     

    After making several trips to Mexico in the 1980s, the artist drew inspiration from the rich and varied cultural history in the country which he referred to as a ‘culture of walls and light’. This influence is most vivid in the soft contouring and gaps of the rectangular forms. These spaces whereby the rusty red bleeds through, appear to be cracks in the ancient stone of the Mayan temples; the fluctuating hues of grey and black reflect the way in which light plays on the uneven surface of such stone. Spatial relationships in the cracks appear to mirror human relationships, whether it is connection, communion, or discord and division. In Scully’s words, ‘My paintings talk of relationships. How bodies come together. How they touch. How they separate. How they live together, in harmony or disharmony. The character of bodies changes constantly through my work… Its edge defines its relationship to its neighbour and how it exists in context. My paintings tell stories that are an abstracted equivalent of how the world of human relationships is made and unmade.’iv

     

     

    i Sean Scully, quoted in Kirsten Claudia Voigt, ‘Reading Between the Surfaces’ in Sean Scully: Vita Duplex, Berlin, 2018, p. 45.

    ii W.B. Yeats, quoted in ‘Sean Scully – Vita Duplex at Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe,’ YouTube, 27 April 2018, online.

    iii Sean Scully, quoted in ‘Sean Scully 2/3 – The Art of Colliding Brutality and Philosophy,’ YouTube, 7 September 2023, online.

    iv Sean Scully, quoted in Walter Smerling, ‘Constantinople or the Sensual Concealed’ in The Imagery of Sean Scully, exh. cat., Munich, 2009, p.8.

    • Provenance

      Mary Boone Gallery, New York
      Galerie Lelong, Paris
      Collection of Karsten Greve, Germany
      Acquired from the above by the present owner

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Untitled

signed and dated 'Sean Scully 1990' on the reverse
oil on linen
76.6 x 76.9 cm (30 1/8 x 30 1/4 in.)
Painted in 1990.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
£180,000 - 200,000 

Sold for £292,100

Contact Specialist

Charlotte Gibbs
Associate Specialist
+44 73931 41144
cgibbs@phillips.com

Simon Tovey
Specialist, Associate Director
+44 20 7318 4084
stovey@phillips.com
 

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale

London Auction 12 October 2023