Sean Scully “Wall of Light”

Sean Scully “Wall of Light”

Mnuchin Gallery

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Mnuchin Gallery presents Sean Scully: Wall of Light. Including over twenty paintings, watercolors, and pastels, the exhibition surveys one of Scully’s most celebrated bodies of work, the Wall of Light series, which he began in 1984 and has continued to develop through today. The exhibition will mark the gallery’s second collaboration with the artist, following Sean Scully: The Eighties in fall 2016. It also coincides with the ten-year anniversary of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s presentation of Scully’s Wall of Light paintings, the artist’s first major museum exhibition in New York. The exhibition will be on view from February 28 through April 14, with a public opening reception in the artist’s honor on February 28 from 5:30 to 7:30pm. Sean Scully: Wall of Light will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue authored by art historian and former long-time chief curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Michael Auping.

The Wall of Light works span decades and locales, capturing the full spectrum of Scully’s subjectivity through the metaphor of architecture. Applying a three-dimensional sensibility to painting has and continues to be a through line in Scully’s oeuvre. As early as 1975, when he first moved to New York, he stripped the industrial wooden racks from his Tribeca studio—a former textile factory— to repurpose their boards as surfaces for his paintings. Anticipating his Wall of Light series, the multi-part constructions he produced from these planks attest to the way in which Scully was already “building” his abstractions before they were walls.

While he would not begin titling his oil on canvas paintings Wall of Light until 1998, Scully credits a trip to Mexico in the early 1980s as the crucial moment of the series’ origin. Captivated by the Mayan ruins he visited, Scully put down several watercolors with a set spontaneously bought before the trip. The delicate translucency of the medium reflects the changing light of the sun on a building as it shifts its position throughout the day. The implications of these experimental watercolors would percolate for a decade before the artist’s luminous stripes metamorphosed into the bricks of his Wall of Light paintings.

Media

• Painting
• Drawing

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