In the last 20 years Sean Scully has emerged as one of the true giants of modern painting. The natural heir to America's colour field painters of the 1950s, and to the dense moodscapes of Mark Rothko in particular. His work has been exhibited and collected by most of the major museums of the world. This exhibition was our second solo show from Scully including new paintings, watercolours and three newly published prints.
Scully is an old fashioned abstract painter who has made his name with ostensibly simple pictures of coloured bands and blocks, and yet his work has the power to contain and express emotion more fluently than almost any other artist working in any other medium today. His paintings have an intensely physical and sometimes uncomfortable presence with the marks of their making undisguised in broad sweeps of paint and they are always more commanding, more complex and more beautiful than than first seems possible.
To mark this exhibition we published a fully illustrated book of the text from a lecture given by Scully at Munich's Pinakothek der Moderne on the present position and context of his own work.