Museum Exhibitions
Géographies Sean Scully solo exhibition at Passerelle Centre d’Art Contemporain in Brest, France
20 October 2023—13 January 2024
Passerelle Centre d’Art Contemporain, Brest, France
The exhibition "Géographies", presented at Passerelle Centre d'art contemporain, takes a fresh look at Sean Scully's immense oeuvre. It looks at the places he has lived and the affections he has developed for particular places.
Great Britain, where he was raised and began working as a typographer from the age of 15 before studying art, was the scene of his first experiments with the grid motif, greatly inspired by a formative sojourn in Morocco. Ireland, his native land, is evoked through literature, while the United States, where he settled in the 1970s, is a place where Scully very recently tackled a social issue with the series of paintings Ghosts. The artist denounces the proliferation of firearms and the constant recourse to violence. The light and Mayan cultural sites of Mexico, which he discovered in the 1980s, has had a lasting influence on his painting. So too has the philosophical rigor of Germany where he has teaching as a professor at the Academy in Munich 2002-2007, and the light and history of art in Spain where he also had a studio for many years. A more recent figurative body of work tells the story of his family, including that of his son, on the island of Eleuthera. Finally, France, a country that Scully cherishes and where he now lives for part of his life, is evoked in particular through its history of art and its landscapes.
