CINCINNATI.- Visitors to the Cincinnati Art Museum this summer will delight in a special exhibition of the recent work of one this country’s leading contemporary artists. Sean Scully: Wall of Light focuses on an important series of paintings, watercolors, pastels, prints and photographs that he has created over the past decade and has been hailed by many as his finest work to date. This exhibition will remain on view until Sept. 3.

Sean Scully: Wall of Light features more than 90 works, including 40 oil paintings, and reveals Scully’s interest in exploring variations on a single theme as well as his remarkable ability—the mark of a great artist—to create complex and deeply moving images by using the simplest of means. The exhibition also demonstrates why Scully is widely admired for both his mastery of many different media and the ways in which he has revitalized the tradition of abstract art, developing a pictorial language that is deeply personal, yet universal in its appeal.

“Over the past three decades, Sean Scully has created an impressive body of work that reveals his deep appreciation of the history of art and a profound understanding of the expressive potential of painting,” notes Timothy Rub, the director of the Cleveland Museum of Art and the coordinating curator of this exhibition. “During the course of his career Scully has revitalized and extended one of the great traditions in modern art—geometric abstraction—and produced some of the most beautiful and eloquent works of our time.”

Wall of Light was inspired by a trip that Scully made to Mexico more than two decades ago and springs from the artist’s vivid memories of light and shadow playing on the ancient Mayan ruins he saw there. He began this series, which now consists of more than 200 works, in 1998 after additional trips to Mexico and a reconsideration of the watercolors he made on his initial visit. These works are composed of just two formal elements—vertical and horizontal bars of color—that have been arranged in different configurations and are richly varied in color and texture. Using this deceptively simple format, Scully has been able to create an extraordinary body of work, ranging in scale from the intimate to the monumental and in spirit from somber to joyful.

Sean Scully has exhibited widely throughout the world and maintains studios in the United States, Spain and Germany, where he holds a position as a professor of painting at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich. His work is represented in the collections of many leading institutions in this country, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

"UBS is proud to partner with the Cincinnati Art Museum and to serve as presenting sponsor of this landmark exhibition,” said Bruce Dyer, Regional Director, UBS Financial Services Inc. “We have a long standing commitment to supporting the arts. We also believe strongly in giving back to the communities in which we live and work, so it gives us great pleasure to help bring this important traveling exhibition to our clients, employees and the community of Cincinnati."