Sean Scully: Tower and Lisson Gallery

© Sean Scully. Courtesy of Lisson Gallery

By MICHAEL KLEIN January 5th. 2026

When the Twin Towers fell, New York was in shock. For artists, the effect was intense, the wound to their city, to the downtown neighborhoods was intense, and for Scully, the memory continues now, some two decades later. The missing towers are forever a sharp memory of tragic loss.

Cities have always been a great subject for painters, New York in particular, from Bellows and Sloan to the Modernist abstractions of Georgia O’Keeffe, Joseph Stella, and the sculpture of John Storr. Scully’s focus is on a once distinguished city landmark, now a matter of recall.

This new series of paintings, big, bold, and architectural in feeling, meditates on that remarkable visual statement that was both a testament to modern engineering and a crown jewel of the New York City skyline. Scully’s latest paintings are his personal tribute to the towers, and also to the city where he lives and works, all achieved in terms of Scully’s characteristic, synthesized geometric abstraction.

Scully’s paintings are built in sections using various kinds of grids as the paradigm for the picture. I reiterate built because individual canvases are placed side by side or stacked. This structural process gives them their physical and visual power.

© Sean Scully. Courtesy of the artist 
 

Like their model, each is monumental in scale and vertical in scope and impressive in its dramatic and daring presence. The grids suggest the myriad grids that are incorporated and combined to build a city: the grid of streets and avenues, building elevations, subway lines, sewer pipes, and the complex infrastructure of grids that lie below the city’s roadways, providing electrical and communication services.

 © Sean Scully. Courtesy of the artist 
 

From canvas to canvas - ten in all presented here- subtle shifts of grid patterns and color; the grids varying vertical or horizontal brushstrokes thick, thin, and in-between. The brushwork provides a certain rhythm, a tempo if you will, nothing is static. The palettes for some muted grays, such as Black Tower, for others, the color reflects the city, as in Blue Tower - taxi yellow; stop sign red; street sign blue.

Scully is an inventor and innovator using the language of abstraction but finding new ways to express it definitively and expand on it so that each new series is a reaffirmation of his process, but always with a fresh and well-informed solution. His solutions are the net result of an intellectual rigor with both passion and delight in the act and art of painting. The Tower Paintings are just that solution. WM