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Lot Essay
Acquired directly from the artist in 2015, Landline 22.1.15 is a large-scale, enveloping pastel from Sean Scully’s acclaimed series of Landlines. With these works Scully abstracts the meeting places of land, sky and sea into soaring, horizontal bands of colour. In the shifting contours between each Scully identifies an emotional dynamism, barely contained in the present work by the thick stacks of pigment whose feathery edges sway against one another and mingle softly. Scully’s tendency to layer dark over light, light over dark is a constant across all the mediums he employs. In Landline 22.1.15 this layering produces an evocative sense of depth, anchoring the bold, abstracted strips of colour to a specificity of place and time. Pale pink, rich wine red, sun-bleached ochre, and deep navy blues combine to form a twilight palette, while the pastel’s texture is wielded to build a soft haze. The effect suggests the rosy glow of a fading sun, refracted and reflected as it descends over a darkening sea.
Scully was born in Ireland, raised in London, and today keeps studios in New York, Barcelona and Mooseurach, a small town in the Bavarian Alps. His practice is deeply embedded in landscape and the places in which he has lived and worked. The Landlines are rooted in Scully’s memory of standing on precipices—of the Aran Islands, the Western-most edge of Europe facing out on the Atlantic, or of Norfolk, looking eastward across the North Sea—and wanting to capture the gently mutating layers of sea and sky. ‘Landlines stand for edges,’ he explains (S. Scully, ‘Landline’, in K. Grovier, ed., Inner: The Collected Writings and Selected Interviews of Sean Scully, Berlin 2016, p. 301). The edges of things have long fascinated Scully, whose Wall of Light and Doric series scrutinised how natural forces such as light and weather perpetually transform the manmade world. With the Landlines Scully inverts this gaze to consider the architectural qualities of nature. Landline 22.1.15 distils the awesome monumentality of nature’s vast contours through the intimate gaze of the individual.
Scully was born in Ireland, raised in London, and today keeps studios in New York, Barcelona and Mooseurach, a small town in the Bavarian Alps. His practice is deeply embedded in landscape and the places in which he has lived and worked. The Landlines are rooted in Scully’s memory of standing on precipices—of the Aran Islands, the Western-most edge of Europe facing out on the Atlantic, or of Norfolk, looking eastward across the North Sea—and wanting to capture the gently mutating layers of sea and sky. ‘Landlines stand for edges,’ he explains (S. Scully, ‘Landline’, in K. Grovier, ed., Inner: The Collected Writings and Selected Interviews of Sean Scully, Berlin 2016, p. 301). The edges of things have long fascinated Scully, whose Wall of Light and Doric series scrutinised how natural forces such as light and weather perpetually transform the manmade world. With the Landlines Scully inverts this gaze to consider the architectural qualities of nature. Landline 22.1.15 distils the awesome monumentality of nature’s vast contours through the intimate gaze of the individual.