Sean Scully

Mnuchin Gallery is proud to announce Sean Scully: The Eighties, a solo exhibition of paintings by Sean Scully (b. 1945, Dublin), the globally renowned painter celebrated for his singular, poetic mode of Post-Minimalist abstraction. Organized in collaboration with the artist, it will be the first exhibition in the United States to examine this breakthrough decade in Scully’s oeuvre.

Scully began his career as an artist in London in the 1960s and achieved early commercial success in the 1970s with his technically virtuosic paintings of minimalist, hard-edged bands and lines. By the mid-1970s, Scully had relocated to New York City, at a time when Minimalism was leading painting to an end point of closure. It was around this time, at the beginning of the 1980s and amidst a wholesale abandonment of abstract painting, that the artist had an epiphany. He explains, “I decided that what had been stripped out of painting—i.e., the ability to make relationships, to be metaphorical and referential, spiritual, poetic, all those things and aspects of human nature—had to be put back in if painting was to go forward.”

During an artist’s residency in Montauk in the summer of 1982, Scully created a body of small paintings (five examples of which are in this exhibition) that would go on to determine his iconography for the next thirty-five years. Hammering together rough pieces of wood found around the studio, he created multipart paintings of softly overlapping bands of color, executed with rich layers of paint and gestural brushstrokes. With their abutting panels of different shapes and depths, these works celebrated their sculptural three-dimensionality, their “objectness,” while still having conversations about part and whole, about figure and ground, about structure and pattern, about discrepancy and harmony, and about specificity and generalization. Upon returning to his Tribeca studio, Scully continued his new mode of working on a much grander scale, stretching deep canvases of various shapes and sizes that he then joined to create single works.

In these compositions, Scully transforms stripes—one of the most rudimentary of motifs—into deeply evocative tableaux. His endlessly nuanced range of colors and textures are inspired directly by specific lived experiences of people, places, and emotions. In their glowing layers of pigment and expressive brushwork lie the spirit and metaphor that Scully sought to reinject into Modernist abstraction. In the decades to follow, Scully has continued to rigorously limit himself to the essential element of the stripe, while creating seemingly boundless fresh variations to express new experiences and emotions. The resulting works are both deeply personal and universally relatable.

Despite its bold departure from the prevalent figurative trends of the ’80s, Scully’s singular mode of working achieved immediate critical acclaim and international prominence. We are pleased to present a focused look at this key moment, bringing together twenty works from museums and private collections spanning from 1982 to 1989. This will be the most in-depth historical exhibition of Scully’s work since the Metropolitan Museum of Art presented his Wall of Light series in 2006. It anticipates his forthcoming solo exhibition of the Landline series at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2017, and his first career retrospective in the United States at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in 2020.

Sean Scully: The Eighties will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated, hardcover catalogue authored by Deborah Solomon.