Sean Scully

Wall of Light

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Contribution by Michael Auping, Phillips Stephen Bennett and Anne Straus

Rizzoli International Publications

Due/Published October 2005, 144 pages, cloth

ISBN 0847827836

Sean Scully is one of the best-known contemporary artists to carry the painterly tradition into the 21st century. For more than thirty years, Scully has produced a vibrant and compelling body of work that is widely collected and internationally exhibited. His familiar signature style of lines or bands of color, alluding to architectural elements such as portals, windows, and walls, is one of the most instantly recognizable in contemporary painting. More than any other artist of his generation, Sean Scully combines formal European traditions of painting with forms of aesthetic experience whose roots lie in American abstract painting.Sean Scully: Wall of Light will present paintings, watercolors, and pastels from the artist's Wall of Light series. In the 1980s and 90s, Scully embarked on a significant body of work following a number of trips to Mexico, entitled Wall of Light. In this series, Scully transcribed his experience of color and light as he traveled through Mexico and witnessed the interplay of light and shadow on the stacked stones of ancient ruins and architectural formations. The resulting paintings combine color and shape in a way that is more airy and balanced than his earlier work. These paintings confirm Scully's position as one of the world's foremost abstract painters. Scully continues to work actively in his studios in New York, Barcelona, and Munich, where he is a professor of painting.