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Lot Essay
'My paintings talk of relationships. How bodies come together. How they touch. How they separate. How they live together, in harmony and disharmony... Its edge defines its relationship to its neighbour and how it exists in context. My paintings want to tell stories that are an abstracted equivalent of how the world of human relationships is made and unmade. How it is possible to evolve as a human being in this' (S. Scully interview with W. Smerling, Constantinople or the Sensual Concealed. The Imagery of Sean Scully, exhibition catalogue, MKM Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst, Duisburg, 2009, p. 8).
In 1969, Scully travelled to Morocco and became captivated by the sights he discovered there: the strips of colour-dyed wool hanging up to dry, the rich carpets and tents, the faded and fragmented facades of buildings he photographed. In 1972 he was awarded a scholarship to Harvard and soon after devoted himself exclusively to abstraction. At first his approach was informed by Minimalism's brand of formal purism but by the early 1980s he came to the conclusion that 'the Minimalists [had] removed the content from Abstract Expressionism. Accordingly art reached the point where it had lost its ability to communicate'; a function and capacity for art which he now deems fundamental (S. Kleine, 'The Imagery of Sean Scully', Constantinople or the Sensual Concealed. The Imagery of Sean Scully, exhibition catalogue, MKM Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst, Duisberg, 2009, p. 18).
In 1969, Scully travelled to Morocco and became captivated by the sights he discovered there: the strips of colour-dyed wool hanging up to dry, the rich carpets and tents, the faded and fragmented facades of buildings he photographed. In 1972 he was awarded a scholarship to Harvard and soon after devoted himself exclusively to abstraction. At first his approach was informed by Minimalism's brand of formal purism but by the early 1980s he came to the conclusion that 'the Minimalists [had] removed the content from Abstract Expressionism. Accordingly art reached the point where it had lost its ability to communicate'; a function and capacity for art which he now deems fundamental (S. Kleine, 'The Imagery of Sean Scully', Constantinople or the Sensual Concealed. The Imagery of Sean Scully, exhibition catalogue, MKM Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst, Duisberg, 2009, p. 18).