DUBLIN.- Kerlin Gallery is presenting The Land / The Line, a solo exhibition of new work by one of the world’s leading contemporary painters, Sean Scully. The Land / The Line brings together seven works from the Landline series, each measuring over two metres in height and almost the same in width. Recently included in an important survey at De Pont Museum, Tilburg, the paintings demonstrate Scully’s consummate mastery of gestural abstraction.
In the Landline series, Scully paints “the elemental coming-together of land and sea”. Though not traditional landscapes, these paintings are nevertheless rooted in a sense of place. They turn our attention to the earth beneath our feet, the push-pull of the tide, and the air extending infinitely above us. Painting with brisk, expressive brushstrokes, Scully stacks horizontal bands of colour on top of one another, allowing them to blend and overlap, ebbing and flowing in undulating rhythms. The expansive scale of these works allows the viewer to be fully immersed in their powerful evocation of the edge of land.
Sean Scully’s art is thoroughly international in perspective, drawing upon diverse historical and cultural influences. He has taken inspiration from many cherished elements of European culture (ranging from the harmonic ideals of ancient Greek architecture to the vernacular design of stone walls in rural Ireland), but he has also successfully responded to – and built on – the legacy of abstraction in the United States. Scully’s commanding, internationally recognisable style of abstract art combines considerable painterly drama with great visual delicacy. It is an art of tremendous vigour: Scully is a forceful, physical artist, who creates intentionally monumental spaces. But it is also an art of acute concentration and care: his work involves an ongoing negotiation between the monumental and the intimate.
A new 234-page publication, Landlines and other recent works, will be launched to coincide with the exhibition. Produced to accompany Scully’s 2018 survey exhibition at De Pont Museum, Tilburg, it ifeatures essays by art critics Rudi Fuchs, Kelly Grovier and Declan Long.
Current and forthcoming solo exhibitions include Sean Scully: 1970, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (14 July – 14 October); Landline, Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, USA (12 September 2018 – 3 February 2019); Inside Outside, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, UK (29 September 2018 – 6 January 2019); Landline, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, USA (23 February – 19 May 2019); Sea Star, National Gallery, London (15 April – 11 August 2019); Vita Duplex, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Münster, Germany (4 May – 8 September 2019); Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria (28 May – 8 September 2019).
