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Lot Essay
‘Abstraction is the art of our age; it’s a breaking down of certain structures, an opening up … It’s a non-denominational religious art. I think it’s the spiritual art of our time’
–Sean Scully
Two vertical panels, each richly painted with thick horizontal bands of colour, hum with near-electric energy in Sean Scully’s 2004 painting Barcelona Red Mirror. Executed on a dramatic scale, the work comprises two conjoined canvases, each of which bears the hallmark configuration of stripes that characterises the artist’s highly emotive, abstract paintings. The left-hand panel is adorned with five bold stripes in alternate hues of crimson and deep mahogany, whilst the right is painted with six off-kilter bands of coal black and lilac, creating an asymmetrical union that never quite resolves. The work harks back to Scully’s early double canvases, initiated in the 1980s, which are defined by a similar sense of imperfect mirroring. This ruptured duality is typical of the artist’s practice, which shies away from fixed constructs in order to evoke the ambiguities and paradoxes inherent in life itself: ‘I don’t believe that art can express a perfect statement’, he has written, ‘nor do I believe that that is its job. Its job is to reflect life in some way … The truth of life is not really a question of certainty’ (S. Scully, quoted in interview with H-M. Herzog, in Sean Scully, exh. cat., South London Gallery, London 1999, unpaged). The present work’s title reflects Scully’s emotive affinity with Barcelona: a city close to his heart, where he has occupied a studio since 1994. The bright Mediterranean light infuses his bold, vibrant palette: each stroke of wet-on-wet paint leaves its trace across the surface of the canvas, revealing a chromatic complexity which seeps through the cracks like sunlight.
Born in Ireland in 1945, Scully was raised in working-class boroughs of North and South London. These formative years were to have a defining impact on his artistic career: he attended a convent school, where he became captivated by the spiritual essence of church paintings, and later by the transcendent colour fields of Mark Rothko. ‘Abstraction is the art of our age’, Scully later declared; ‘it’s a breaking down of certain structures, an opening up. It allows you to think without making obsessively specific references, so that the viewer is free to identify with the work. Abstract art has the possibility of being incredibly generous, really out there for everybody. It’s a non-denominational religious art. I think it’s the spiritual art of our time’ (S. Scully, quoted in Sean Scully: The Art of the Stripe, exh. cat., Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, 2008, p. 13). Today, Scully lives and works between Barcelona, New York City and Munich. As a transnational artist, the question of identity is vital to his practice: through a tangible layering of paint, his artworks provide a compelling metaphor for the multiple strands that one’s identity acquires over time. With its mismatched binaries, Barcelona Red Mirror speaks to this sense of hybrid selfhood. ‘As art, of course, in the end comes out of life, it will reflect mercilessly your own life,’ Scully has intuited. ‘That’s what’s so interesting to me, though, and profoundly true about being a painter’ (S. Scully, quoted in interview with H-M. Herzog, in Sean Scully, exh. cat., South London Gallery, London 1999, unpaged).
–Sean Scully
Two vertical panels, each richly painted with thick horizontal bands of colour, hum with near-electric energy in Sean Scully’s 2004 painting Barcelona Red Mirror. Executed on a dramatic scale, the work comprises two conjoined canvases, each of which bears the hallmark configuration of stripes that characterises the artist’s highly emotive, abstract paintings. The left-hand panel is adorned with five bold stripes in alternate hues of crimson and deep mahogany, whilst the right is painted with six off-kilter bands of coal black and lilac, creating an asymmetrical union that never quite resolves. The work harks back to Scully’s early double canvases, initiated in the 1980s, which are defined by a similar sense of imperfect mirroring. This ruptured duality is typical of the artist’s practice, which shies away from fixed constructs in order to evoke the ambiguities and paradoxes inherent in life itself: ‘I don’t believe that art can express a perfect statement’, he has written, ‘nor do I believe that that is its job. Its job is to reflect life in some way … The truth of life is not really a question of certainty’ (S. Scully, quoted in interview with H-M. Herzog, in Sean Scully, exh. cat., South London Gallery, London 1999, unpaged). The present work’s title reflects Scully’s emotive affinity with Barcelona: a city close to his heart, where he has occupied a studio since 1994. The bright Mediterranean light infuses his bold, vibrant palette: each stroke of wet-on-wet paint leaves its trace across the surface of the canvas, revealing a chromatic complexity which seeps through the cracks like sunlight.
Born in Ireland in 1945, Scully was raised in working-class boroughs of North and South London. These formative years were to have a defining impact on his artistic career: he attended a convent school, where he became captivated by the spiritual essence of church paintings, and later by the transcendent colour fields of Mark Rothko. ‘Abstraction is the art of our age’, Scully later declared; ‘it’s a breaking down of certain structures, an opening up. It allows you to think without making obsessively specific references, so that the viewer is free to identify with the work. Abstract art has the possibility of being incredibly generous, really out there for everybody. It’s a non-denominational religious art. I think it’s the spiritual art of our time’ (S. Scully, quoted in Sean Scully: The Art of the Stripe, exh. cat., Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, 2008, p. 13). Today, Scully lives and works between Barcelona, New York City and Munich. As a transnational artist, the question of identity is vital to his practice: through a tangible layering of paint, his artworks provide a compelling metaphor for the multiple strands that one’s identity acquires over time. With its mismatched binaries, Barcelona Red Mirror speaks to this sense of hybrid selfhood. ‘As art, of course, in the end comes out of life, it will reflect mercilessly your own life,’ Scully has intuited. ‘That’s what’s so interesting to me, though, and profoundly true about being a painter’ (S. Scully, quoted in interview with H-M. Herzog, in Sean Scully, exh. cat., South London Gallery, London 1999, unpaged).