Sean Scully's Pioneering work of the 80s on at Lisson Gallery, NY

By EDWARD WAISNIS December 14, 2024

Seven paintings that explicate the developments Sean Scully navigated during his pivotal breakthrough period between 1981 and 1983 with a couple of Easter eggs in the form of two recent paintings and three watercolors from the middle years (2015 and 2021) are the cumulative content of this exhibition, pointedly focused on the work made in the developing hothouse environment of a nascent TriBeCa.

Exhibition view of ‘Sean Scully: Duane Street 1981–1983’ at Lisson Gallery, New York, 29 October–1 February 2025 © Sean Scully, Courtesy Lisson Gallery
  

In the paintings there are no accidents. There’s the result of an attitude…but, it’s not an accident.

Immerse myself with the subject matter so that it becomes slowly transformed through a process of devotion, will and imagination causing a   gradual and authentic evolution.
                                                                                                       –Sean Scully*

Rising from the bones of  a crushing doctrinaire philosophy that lorded over contemporary art, arriving in tandem with the birth of the Yuppies and coinciding with the rise of Reagan (which may account from the air of the luxurious) Scully navigated and absorbed Post-Modernism and managed to land in the upper echelon of contemporary artists. Pulling such a feat off may be, at least in part, attributable to the attitude and will that Scully tips his hat to in the quotations cited above. But, I think, it has a lot to do with his rough scrabble upbringing; the term fortitude is applicable.

A near contemporary, Richard Serra, and the much less lauded, but I would argue equally seminal, Richard Nonas shared the same lower Manhattan landscape that profoundly influenced anyone who managed to tread there at the time. Environs now recalled with a sweet sense of nostalgical, having been transformed into the playground and residences of influencers, fashionistas and the one percent.

But, back to Serra and Nonas, obviously, they are both known for working in three dimensions, something Scully has only taken up in the relatively recent timeline of his practice. However, Scully has acknowledged the sculptural in his painting for a long time. The gallery press release, curiously, refers to the paintings as ‘constructions’ confirming this physicality in Scully’s work.

Sol LeWitt might seem an even odder one to bring into the fray, but the systemic approach as well as indebtedness to post and lintel construction make it apropos in a roundabout fashion. And, keep in mind that a major LeWitt retrospective was mounted at MoMA as Scully was beginning his career journey. The strict mathematical variance of Minimalism is absent in Scully’s work. The exception being a series of black (and color-additive near black) paintings composed of smart 'Saville Row tailored' pinstripes from the late 70s.

Sean Scully: Six Drawings for Recent Paintings, ARTextreme, Number 2 Spring/Summer, 1982 (NOTE: Not Part of the Exhibition)
 

Full Disclosure: I had the pleasure of contact–albeit exclusively via correspondence–with Scully smack dab in the center of the period covered in this exhibition, having invited him to contribute page art to a short-run magazine that I published and edited–ARTextreme **–in the years after a two-year stint working and living in a loft space literally around the corner from where Scully maintained his studio on Duane Street. Upon digging out and reviewing the now antique issue of the zine I came to realize that Scully’s drawings coincided exactly with the creation of the paintings gathered here. I offer them as a point of curiosity, for any elucidation they may elicit on the artist’s process, as well as lending them the distinction of being read as working sketches for the body of work under examination.

Sean Scully, Backs and Fronts, 1981, oil on linen and canvas, 96 x 240 inches © Sean Scully, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

Backs and Fronts, 1981, which was last exhibited in New York at MoMA PS1 in 1982, made a bang in the nascent years of what would be tagged with the iconic monikers: New Wave, New Age, Neo-Expressionism and Neo-Geo, as well as the introduction of deconstruction and the simulacrum, expounded on in the philosophy of Foucault, and as the institution was finding the footing that transformed it into the museum we know today. Its zippiness, offering towering vertical panels in an array of striped that alternate directions from one to the next and executed in vibrant combinations, in contrast to the gloom that predominated in the works that preceded it allowing the saw-tooth edge created by the differing heights of the just short of a dozen panels that constitute the whole, to summon another element of vibrancy. With suggestions of distinctly European awning material turns the whole affair into an evocation of a Cote d’Azur scene one might find in Matisse, rendered in a view from a window in the background here brought front and center. Then there is the recall of Daniel Buren’s steadfast stripes got in my head.

Araby, 1981, named after a short story by James Joyce, represents a midway point between Scully’s use of masking-taped lines and the denial of aids in favor of fluid gestures and the embrace of the disjunction that reads as happenstance that would come to predominate his later work. These aspects led Scully to describe this period in his progress as enabling him “to slice and cut through the staid field of abstract art” and this piece, specifically, as being “in a fight with itself”***.

Sean Scully, Adoration, 1982, oil on canvas, linen and wood, 108 x 156 inches © Sean Scully, Courtesy Lisson Gallery
 

Adoration, 1982, offers a benchmark, denoting where Scully would be heading. The fuzzy edges of the ‘stripes’ allow peaking to the underpainting, something that would come to preoccupy Scully, while the title suggests figuration through the body the holy. Prominent to the overall experience is the jutting out created by the relief achieved by the deployment of panels of varied depths, implying a reach for the third dimension. The marked leaning in to the buttery qualities of paint, tht Scully would develop and exploit, begins here.

Blame, 1983, expands this direction and incorporates gravity with its sense of being top-heavy and by introducing Scully’s now signature wide-banded striped.

Sean Scully, The Bather, 1983, oil on linen, 96 x 120 inches © Sean Scully, Courtesy Lisson Gallery
 

The Bather, 1983, provides the sine qua non conclusion to the build up, both concretely and metaphorically, that the exhibition has examined. Beginning with a title suggestive of the School of Paris to the corporality of the Mediterranean blue and green vertical bands interrupted by a pillar of horizontal orange and peach blocks, and with panels coming into the room sometimes as much as a foot, the works presence is undeniable, staying with the viewer long after the encounter.

Sean Scully, Landline Dark Red, oil on aluminum, 85 x 75 x 2 inches © Sean Scully, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

Tucked away, around the corner in a cordoned off space, are the two paintings freshly minted during the current year, Blue Gray Landline and Landline Dark Red delivering a coda as well as a flash forward to the present. Executed on Scully’s now ubiquitous aluminum panels (he uses copper as well) produces a slick juicy glide that bears comparison to the strokes of Howard Hodgkin, who also relies on non-traditional grounds, in his case found wooden panels, cupboard doors, bowls, etc. In Scully’s case, the material has brought down the urge to combine, and modulate depth, of his panels. His long enlisted insets (Scully refers to them as windows) have continued to play a role. In the case of these two works they have been left uninflected conceding to the urgency and color of the age-old substance applied to them. Landline Dark Red is given the provocative step of invoking go-to drips favored by Ab-Ex along the bottom quadrant of the piece. Shades of Pollock, Mitchell, Marden and Steir that, though indebted, add an engaging vibrancy.

For all their verbosity these are singularly solitary works, to be encountered and digested (taken in) in solitude and quiet. Like Rothko, the abundance of poetry that negates the musical (perhaps the intensity of this preponderance could have contributed to Rothko’s undoing), but never bereft of rhythm, Scully favors his facture to emanate through language. This should not be surprising given heritage which is widely accepted as being amongst the greatest generators, and acolytes, who genuflect to the glamour of the word and the turn of phrase. WM

* Sean Scully: Why This, Not That?, Sean Scully Studio, YouTube video 2009 and Sean Scully: Wall of Light Lecture at the Met., Sean Scully Studio YouTube video, 2005, respectively.
** The entire run of eight issues of ARTextreme magazine, published between 1981 and 1989, are archived with Printed Matter and  MoMA, both New York, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
*** Lisson Gallery, NY press release announcing the exhibition Sean Scully: Duane Street 1981–1983.

SeanScully: Duane Street 1981-1983
Lisson Gallery
504 West 24th Street, New York
October 29–February 1, 2025