Sean Scully

The Taylor Galleries, Belfast
Private Collection, Europe
Sale: Sotheby's, London, Contemporary Art Evening Auction, 29 June 2011, Lot 87
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the red tones are somewhat brighter and the tonality of the beige is deeper in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals a very small loss to the extreme top edge towards the left corner. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Iris is a stunning example of Scully’s career-long exploration of abstract painting; a highly resolved work that echoes the robust palette of Valencia Wall (2006) -which achieved the record price for the artist at auction in 2008. Utilising his inimitable pictoral dialect, comprising of vertical and horizontal rectangles, or 'bricks', of varying length and breadth, the present work is formally and thematically in tune with the Wall of Light series that has been Scully's abiding concern since it was begun in the late 1990s. The horizontals and verticals, as Scully notes, are “symbolic and psychological. Horizontals are the eternal horizon, where we see the edge of our own local world. Verticals are assertive, like us standing. There are a lot of references to figures and nature in my work, so naturally it has a psychological aspect to it, where the assertive and the affirmative human action come into contact with the permanent” (the artist cited in David Carrier, Sean Scully, London 2004, p. 211).

Scully builds up his fragmented compositions, applying multiple layers of varnished-thickened oil paint. With its elegant emphasis on burnt, terracotta reds, thick, inky blacks, tempered by sumptuous bricks of pearl-like pink, Iris is remarkable for its boldness of hue. Building layer upon layer, the feathered edges of his bricks and the spaces between them create highly complex structures. At the seams of the paint surface, individual fields of colour collide or gently nudge one another, creating narrow indentations and revealing previous layers of pigment like light seeping through the cracks in a wall. Compositionally, the work evokes an architectural structure, evocative of dry stone walls and post-and-lintel constructions. In its formal reduction, repetition and variation, Scully establishes a conflict between structured composition and seriality that is the very essence of his painting:  “I have always been deeply attracted to a sense of structure. In those terms another monumental influence for me would be Cézanne, whose work is heroic. He is a builder of paintings; he said that all he had was his little thrill. And this, in a sense is all I have. I go to the mountain, as he did, again and again, and I am driven by love and feeling” (the artist cited in: Ibid., p. 209).

The Wall of Light series was born out of an influential trip that Scully made to Mexico in the early 1980s, where he became fascinated by the stacked stones of ancient Mayan walls at Yucatan, which, when animated by light, these ancient stones seemed to reflect the passage of time: "[t]hese places in the Yucatan were cities, now you see a wall, what remains, a wall transformed by light, the walls change colour, from pink to blue to red. I would get up early, the shadows completely transform the ruined architecture, they make it seem hopeful one moment, tragic another" (Ibid., p. 25). After successive return visits and almost twenty years after the initial trip, Scully made his first Wall of Light painting in 1998. Although in essence an abstract painter, Scully's paintings are linked by their titles to specific people, places and experiences. An itinerant artist, he has studios in New York, London, Munich and Barcelona and the different atmospheres of those cities feeds into the paintings that he made there. With its similar palette of intense oxide reds and less constrained, asymmetrical composition, Iris can be seen a precursor to Scully’s Valencia Wall (2006). An ode to the Mediterranean light, evoking sun baked terracotta and long, creeping shadows of dusk in the Spanish coastal city, the present work is testament to Scully's sensorially rooted abstration. This is, as the artist notes, “something I do a lot. I see something and I have a feeling of something- it might be the light, or the heat, they are very specific in that sense- and I unload the painting…’ (the artist cited in: Florence Ingleby, Sean Scully Restistance and Persistance: Selected Writings, London 2006, p. 179). Within his succulently coloured paintings, the key hue is black- the only colour that he uses in its pure state.  For Scully, black is resolutely a colour, not simply a void or a shadow. The ‘luminous blacks’ are a key source in the paintings of Seventeenth Century Spanish artists, which he loves, from Velazquez to Goya, and are present here in four masonry-like slabs which anchor the composition. Like the Spanish Old Masters, Scully is concerned with the brushstroke and the gestural effects of the human hand. Deep layers of colour lurk below the surface revealing the artist's hesitations, his thought processes and vulnerabilities; nonetheless the painterly gesture of his brushstrokes are definite and permanent.

More than any artist of his generation, Scully combines the formal traditions of European painting – the brooding tones of Velazquez and Manet and the spectacular colours and brushwork of van Gogh and Cezanne – with a distinctly American abstract tradition, epitomised in particular by Rothko and Pollock. Born in Ireland, he studied in London but settled in New York in 1975 seeing the heroic American post-war painters as his inspiration.  Of all the Abstract Expressionists, Scully has the greatest affinity with Rothko, whose iconic canvases combine light with darkness and a moody, melancholic drama. Wanting to draw on Rothko’s Romantic urge to seduce the viewer into the visual plane, Scully has evolved his own abstract language of rectangular brick-like forms that fit closely together. Via characteristic broad and layered brushstrokes and depth of palette, Iris is an exemplary illustration of Scully’s visual language.