'I want my brushstrokes to be full of feeling – material feeling manifested in form and colour.' —Sean Scully 

One of the most admired and widely respected painters working today, Irish-born Sean Scully has been credited with having ‘single-handedly taken Abstract Expressionism into the 21^st century’.ⁱ  In his stunningly beautiful and meditative paintings, Scully strips back the relationships between light, colour, and from, using the simple shapes of the square and the stripe to create intense emotional resonance. 

 

Resolutely abstract, Green Yellow Figure nevertheless conjures certain representational associations: walls, windows, and even the suggestion of two standing figures anchored against three vertical bands of alternating earthy tones of orange and red. Executed in 2002, the present work balances geometric precision with a profound expressivity that is typical of Scully’s finest works. Defined by an exceptional lightness of touch and fluid treatment of paint, the compositional relationships established here between individual blocks of colour generates a remarkable sense of rhythmic movement, playing with deceptively simple geometries which explore the painterly legacies of abstraction. 

'As I impact with the paintings, and I hope as others impact with the paintings, so the divisions within the paintings impact and form relations with each other. This movement of us coming together within the painting, as the painting remakes its own relationships, within its own borders, is meant to be a moment of emotion.' —Sean Scully 

Legacies of Abstraction 

 

Blending the modernist grid exemplified by Piet Mondrian with the diffused washes of colour used to such powerful emotional effect in Mark Rothko’s deeply meditative canvases, Scully deftly blends a tradition of European modernism with American post-war abstraction. Hypnotically rhythmic, Scully’s interlocking squares and stripes possess a remarkable vitality, his thinned paints applied with such forceful expressivity that the fluid blocks of colour merge and bleed into one another. 

 

Presenting a canvas set within a canvas, Green Yellow Figure is wonderfully representative of Scully’s innovative use of carefully fitted inserts, endowing the work with a striking sculptural quality. This is further emphasised by the multidirectional rhythms of the brushstrokes, producing wonderfully energetic intersections of vertical and horizontal elements. 

 

Connected through their intense palette, rich painterly treatment, and deceptively simple geometries, Scully’s works from this period present close-laid ‘bricks’ of fluidly painted colour, as is clear in Green Yellow Figure. Much like Paul Klee many years before, a visit to Morocco would prove to be highly significant for Scully’s approach to light and colour in the years following 1969. Inspired by the novelty of the richly patterned materials and environment that contrasted so vividly with the Dublin of his youth, Scully began to incorporate these features into his work with increasing sophistication. A later visit to Mexico would prove to be equally influential, the distinctive quality of light as it hit the stacked stones of ancient Mayan monuments directly informing his substantial Wall of Light series, to which the compositional structure of the present work refers. As the artist has described: ‘the way I’m painting directly affects the weight of the paint and thus the colour. Everything is painted into its place, as the title ‘wall’ implies I’m building a surface, but I’m building out of feeling directly, and this feeling has rhythm.’ⁱⁱ  

'I’m always trying to combine morality, which I see manifested in structure, with high emotion, manifested in beauty.' —Sean Scully 

Combining the weight of ancient architectural monuments with Cezanne’s architectonic treatment of landscape, Scully nevertheless imbues his works with a warm and diffused light. His paintings from this period distil a remarkable sensitivity to natural and architectural forms, as his more recent Doric and Landline series explore in more depth. With no clear distinction between figure and ground in these utopian visions, ‘there is no visual hierarchy because every element is equal to every other.’ⁱⁱⁱ At once monumentally physical and atmospherically abstract, Green Yellow Figure exemplifies the raw power and narrative capacity of Scully’s work, speaking to his ability to succinctly capture a sense of place while conveying emotion through colour, light, and solidity. 

 

Sean Scully painting, clip taken from the documentary Unstoppable: Sean Scully and the Art of Everything, 2019

 

Collector’s Digest 

 

•    Sean Scully has exhibited around the world, most notably in his stand-out 2006 exhibition Wall of Light -at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

 

•    Scully’s work can be found in the permanent collections of major museums worldwide, with the Philadelphia Museum of Art devoting an entire room to his work. In 2015 the artist opened a permanent exhibition of his works in a renovated monastery in Montserrat, outside Barcelona. 

 

•    As well as recent exhibitions of new work with Lisson Gallery, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth presented the substantial survey exhibition Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas earlier this year. 
 

ⁱ David Carrier, Sean Scully, London, 2004, p. 17. 
ⁱⁱ Sean Scully, quoted in Kevin Power, “Questions for Sean Scully”, April 2003, online
ⁱⁱⁱ David Carrier, Sean Scully, London, 2004, p. 193.