Thaddaeus Ropac Brings Together Works from Sean Scully's Most Formative Series

Reducing the pictorial plane and exploring different modalities of geometric forms in favor of purer images were the matters of pursuit undertaken by those artists involved with Minimalism back in the late 1960s and 1970s. The movement was primarily centered in the US, but it affected the practitioners living and working in other environments meaning it had an international resonance.

Sean Scully is one of them. In the first place, the Irish artist found the mentioned framework easy to relate to and then tried to translate it to what he described as Emotional abstraction. Throughout the decades, he has developed a consistent body of work that is part of several museum collections worldwide.

This month, Scully, the lecturer, professor, writer, and twice Turner Prize nominee, returns to the public spotlight with an exhibition titled The Shadow of Figuration at Thaddaeus Ropac Galerie that will bring a selection of his most recent works.

Drawn To The Stillness of Landscape

The upcoming show is specially crafted to fit the Salzburg gallery. The visitors will be able to see large-scale paintings from the artist’s best-known series, a selection of watercolors, and a monumental sculpture titled Indoor Sleeper (2020) that will be installed in a public space in front of the gallery.

The works of Sean Scully are a result of the mix of European painting traditions with the properties of American abstraction. Centered on horizontally or vertically arranged stripes or layered color blocks, the paintings in the exhibition showcase the artist’s ability to achieve balance, calmness, and vibrancy.