Lot Essay
By restricting himself to painting stripes for the last twenty years, Sean Scully has often invited comparison with the Minimalist artists. However, Scully has often stated that to do so is to a large extent to miss the point of his work. Scully sees his paintings as being more in the spiritual tradition of the great Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko. Scully tries to express in his work something of the spiritual nature of the human condition through what he calls the "competitive" use of the surprisingly complex and often very physical relationships that can exist between very simple forms and colours.
"What I am trying to do," he says, "is different from what other abstract painters of my generation are trying to do... . I'm trying to put many things into my paintings. I put the things in competition with each other. So that instead of trying to paint a relationship, I paint the areas and put them together and that makes a relationship, that is a relationship. But the relationships are not controlled and they're not completely articulated. They're rather sculptural in that sense... I'm not trying to make calm harmonies. Not at all... Harmony is coming out of what you already know... disharmony is much more interesting and life affirming than harmony." (As quoted in: Hans-Michael, Sean Scully: The Catherine Paintings, London 1995.)
By making paintings that are often made up of a series of separate, but interlocking canvases, each form becomes a separate "personality" that has an intrinsic and unique relationship to the whole. This reveals a deliberately intended paradox for the viewer in that visually the various segments of the work belong together yet physically they actively disassociate themselves. In this respect as Scully himself has explained, his work is similar to that of Polke's: "What Polke does, is to obviously layer, using the device of transparency to show the transitional and difficult nature of relationships. Simultaneous happenings, simultaneous facts, simultaneous realities. And what I've done is the physical opposite. Instead of using the strategy of transparency to show this difficulty and this possibility. I've used the strategy of extreme physicality and opacity. So my paintings always have a sculptural aspect, and if you have these relationships where the beauty or the harmony that you make has - as it does in my painting - the threat of physical collapse, you indeed engage the viewer on a higher level of involvement in the painting." (op.cit.).
The very physical quality of Scully's work, is also enchanced by the boldness of his stripes and by the heavy and confident brushstrokes that are layered one on top of the other in a way that emphasises their materiality. It is Scully's prodigious power as a colourist moreover that gives his work a transcendent quality that asserts the wholeness of the work.
More Light is a painting of the late 1980s; a period when Scully had just returned to painting after a three month break in early 1987 during which the artist had undergone psychoanalysis. Scully now particularly experimented with the heightened contrasts of black and white. Yet despite the seeming monumentality of More Light, it is a work of subtle contrasts that deliberately juxtaposes the compactness and solidity of the central panel with the bold openness of the larger canvas. Scully uses the heavy-pasted brushstrokes of ochre and black to give a sense of compacted energy to the central panel, whilst the white - quite possibly the "light" of the title - is painted in more delicate strokes that blend with the underpainted rose colouring to create a warm radiating colour which glows with life and brings a spatially dominant and transcendent spirituality to the work as a whole.
"What I am trying to do," he says, "is different from what other abstract painters of my generation are trying to do... . I'm trying to put many things into my paintings. I put the things in competition with each other. So that instead of trying to paint a relationship, I paint the areas and put them together and that makes a relationship, that is a relationship. But the relationships are not controlled and they're not completely articulated. They're rather sculptural in that sense... I'm not trying to make calm harmonies. Not at all... Harmony is coming out of what you already know... disharmony is much more interesting and life affirming than harmony." (As quoted in: Hans-Michael, Sean Scully: The Catherine Paintings, London 1995.)
By making paintings that are often made up of a series of separate, but interlocking canvases, each form becomes a separate "personality" that has an intrinsic and unique relationship to the whole. This reveals a deliberately intended paradox for the viewer in that visually the various segments of the work belong together yet physically they actively disassociate themselves. In this respect as Scully himself has explained, his work is similar to that of Polke's: "What Polke does, is to obviously layer, using the device of transparency to show the transitional and difficult nature of relationships. Simultaneous happenings, simultaneous facts, simultaneous realities. And what I've done is the physical opposite. Instead of using the strategy of transparency to show this difficulty and this possibility. I've used the strategy of extreme physicality and opacity. So my paintings always have a sculptural aspect, and if you have these relationships where the beauty or the harmony that you make has - as it does in my painting - the threat of physical collapse, you indeed engage the viewer on a higher level of involvement in the painting." (op.cit.).
The very physical quality of Scully's work, is also enchanced by the boldness of his stripes and by the heavy and confident brushstrokes that are layered one on top of the other in a way that emphasises their materiality. It is Scully's prodigious power as a colourist moreover that gives his work a transcendent quality that asserts the wholeness of the work.
More Light is a painting of the late 1980s; a period when Scully had just returned to painting after a three month break in early 1987 during which the artist had undergone psychoanalysis. Scully now particularly experimented with the heightened contrasts of black and white. Yet despite the seeming monumentality of More Light, it is a work of subtle contrasts that deliberately juxtaposes the compactness and solidity of the central panel with the bold openness of the larger canvas. Scully uses the heavy-pasted brushstrokes of ochre and black to give a sense of compacted energy to the central panel, whilst the white - quite possibly the "light" of the title - is painted in more delicate strokes that blend with the underpainted rose colouring to create a warm radiating colour which glows with life and brings a spatially dominant and transcendent spirituality to the work as a whole.