.jpg?w=1)
拍品专文
'Mystery in art is very important to me. I feel that a lot of that is being squeezed out of art in today’s mechanized, digitized world. A number of the twentieth-century artists I most admire – artists like Barnett Newman, Giorgio Morandi and Ernst Kirchner – created mythologies in order to keep mystery at the core of their work and to fight off a sense that they were becoming disconnected from the natural world’
—SEAN SCULLY
With its two square panels of opposing stripes, painted in deep shades of navy, purple and earthy red, Sean Scully’s In The Old Style (1980) is a resonant, uncompromising composition that examines both the relationships between the forms on its canvas and the nature and meaning of abstract painting itself. In the repetitions of the dark, narrow bands that the artist has made his own, Scully stages striking, elemental conflicts between colour and line, concentrating attention on the regular points at which vertical axis meets horizontal, and fields of colour come up against one another in quietly stirring juxtapositions. Almost ritualistically applying his paint to the canvas, Scully uses these reactions to investigate the way in which abstract form can carry and communicate emotional or metaphysical realities that go beyond the work’s purely formal properties. With each stripe individually marked by the subtle gradations and contours of Scully’s oil paint, the surface has a beautiful worked quality, a roughhewn texturality that bespeaks the physical and spiritual effort undergone by the painter himself as he struggles with the space of the canvas – and that brings us as viewers up close to the material reality of the world around us, and its mysterious relationship with more ethereal planes of experience.
The work dates from Scully’s first period of stripe paintings in oils, arguably the period in which the artist reached artistic maturity; moving away from the more linearly complicated, acrylic works of the early 1970s, his works at the end of the decade liberated the stripe from the cold, clean influence of Minimalism and Op Art and paved the way for his work to come. Acquiring a new intensity of tone in the thick application of the oils, Scully’s work at this point is suffused with a new sensitivity to what the artist calls ‘the body’ – the rich, mysterious visual and material substantiality of the paint on the canvas: ‘The decision to move toward oil paint was of course the decision to move away from the line into the body, to the mystery of the body and the surface in painting that is so powerful and remains so to this day… the lines are very physically raised up on the surface, and this is oil painting working here… There is a certain unpredictability to it. The colors become very rich and mysterious but full of the power of materiality… All the great painters in the history of painting have the sense of the body, the really great ones’ (S. Scully, in B. Kennedy, Sean Scully: The Art of the Stripe, exh. cat., Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, 2008).
—SEAN SCULLY
With its two square panels of opposing stripes, painted in deep shades of navy, purple and earthy red, Sean Scully’s In The Old Style (1980) is a resonant, uncompromising composition that examines both the relationships between the forms on its canvas and the nature and meaning of abstract painting itself. In the repetitions of the dark, narrow bands that the artist has made his own, Scully stages striking, elemental conflicts between colour and line, concentrating attention on the regular points at which vertical axis meets horizontal, and fields of colour come up against one another in quietly stirring juxtapositions. Almost ritualistically applying his paint to the canvas, Scully uses these reactions to investigate the way in which abstract form can carry and communicate emotional or metaphysical realities that go beyond the work’s purely formal properties. With each stripe individually marked by the subtle gradations and contours of Scully’s oil paint, the surface has a beautiful worked quality, a roughhewn texturality that bespeaks the physical and spiritual effort undergone by the painter himself as he struggles with the space of the canvas – and that brings us as viewers up close to the material reality of the world around us, and its mysterious relationship with more ethereal planes of experience.
The work dates from Scully’s first period of stripe paintings in oils, arguably the period in which the artist reached artistic maturity; moving away from the more linearly complicated, acrylic works of the early 1970s, his works at the end of the decade liberated the stripe from the cold, clean influence of Minimalism and Op Art and paved the way for his work to come. Acquiring a new intensity of tone in the thick application of the oils, Scully’s work at this point is suffused with a new sensitivity to what the artist calls ‘the body’ – the rich, mysterious visual and material substantiality of the paint on the canvas: ‘The decision to move toward oil paint was of course the decision to move away from the line into the body, to the mystery of the body and the surface in painting that is so powerful and remains so to this day… the lines are very physically raised up on the surface, and this is oil painting working here… There is a certain unpredictability to it. The colors become very rich and mysterious but full of the power of materiality… All the great painters in the history of painting have the sense of the body, the really great ones’ (S. Scully, in B. Kennedy, Sean Scully: The Art of the Stripe, exh. cat., Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, 2008).