Bringing together works on paper by Irish-born, American artist Sean Scully produced within the past year with historical drawings dating from the 1960s to the 1980s, Carbon and Air spans rare figurative works as well as testifying to the evolution of some of the artist’s best-known abstract series, Wall of Light and Landline.
Watch the artist talk about the exhibition
In the process of drawing, you tend to try to release the inherent qualities of light that are already in the paper. You want to be able to scribble in a way that releases light. And for that, you don’t really need colour. I think all abstract painters are interested in light in one way or another, teasing it out and trying to conjure it up. Even paintings that are made very matter-of-factly or conceptually, they still tend to radiate light to some degree. That’s fundamental to painting, always has been, since cave painters. — Sean Scully
In 2023, Scully began a new series of works in which he reimagines some of the most recognisable compositional motifs of his paintings in pencil on paper. From the densely arranged rectangular forms found in his Wall of Light series to the stacked horizontal structures of his Landline works, these familiar shapes, which are always rooted in the forms he finds in the real world, reemerge through intricate, meditative hatching and shading.
2.3.24, 2024Pencil on paper
30 x 42 cm (11.8 x 16.5 in)
Though known for his use of colour, monochrome also holds an important place in Scully’s palette. Born in Dublin, Ireland, his family moved when he was four years old to the grey, industrial outskirts of London. In 1975, when he arrived in New York, he began what he has called a ‘five-year love affair with Minimalism’, inspired by the city to reduce his palette back down to these same monochromes in his ‘Black paintings’. Scully’s pencil drawings serve as a reminder of his relationship to high Minimalism through their formal self-sufficiency, while demonstrating his masterly ability to convey light in black and white through meticulous shading, creating, as curator Dávid Fehér writes, ‘colour without colour’.
Like in the drawings of Georges Seurat, an important reference for Scully, densely filled space contrasts with sparser areas in which the individual strokes of his pencil are visible to form compositional structures guided by tone rather than line. The remarkable range he finds within monochrome, meanwhile, is profoundly influenced by the force of ‘the dialectical, or the grey’ in Giorgio Morandi’s work. In some of the drawings, subtle application of blue, purple or red pencil introduces touches of colour.
10.25.23, 2023Pencil on paper
30 x 42 cm (11.8 x 16.5 in)
Drawing has accompanied Scully’s practice as a painter since the beginning of his career, and his works on paper, in the words of curators Joanna Kleinberg and Brett Littmen, ‘both paraphrase and diversify the ideas in his canvases’. Conceived as a development or extension of existing motifs – as ‘stripping the motifs bare’, as Dávid Fehér writes – rather than as studies or preliminary sketches for his paintings, the artist’s drawings turn the often implied hierarchical relationship between the two mediums on its head. Harnessing the intimacy of drawing, Scully brings his familiar typologies of work to their purest conclusion to portray the essence at the heart of the compositions he returns to again and again.
