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拍品專文
This painting will be included in Sean Scully: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, 1980-1989, by Marla Price, copublished in October 2018 by The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and Hatje Cantz. (Cat. No. 1982.15).
Painted at a turning point in the artist’s career, Sean Scully’s Altamura seeks a more human connection through a mature painterly physicality; gone are the rigid and compact bands of black and gray that he executed throughout the 1970s, replaced instead with more colorful hues in expressive brushstrokes. Arthur C. Danto suggests, Scully builds the wall with “slabs” of color, rather than adorning it, abutting beams of gray and pink against posts of rust and blue, so that an architectural form materializes out of paint (A. Danto, Danto on Scully, Ostfildern, 2015, p. 92). In Scully’s hands, the painting, once understood as a window to another world, becomes a wall against which one must confront himself before charting a new path.
To underscore the inherent contradiction between material and function, Altamura engages with the language of architecture in both content and form by way of its diptych construction. Joining two panels in a medieval technique reserved for religious devotional images, Scully subtly invokes the humble disposition of the faithful and redirects it toward the introspective self. The artist provides the framework for the viewer’s meditation through individually defined panels that yield to collective implications when experienced as a complete work. Refined in stature yet pulsing with unlived potential, Altamura bears witness to Scully’s change of heart, pushing his work toward a more visceral exploration of “the architecture of our spirituality” (S. Scully quoted in N. Rifkin, Sean Scully: Twenty Years, 1976-1995, exh. cat. High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 1995, p. 43).
Painted at a turning point in the artist’s career, Sean Scully’s Altamura seeks a more human connection through a mature painterly physicality; gone are the rigid and compact bands of black and gray that he executed throughout the 1970s, replaced instead with more colorful hues in expressive brushstrokes. Arthur C. Danto suggests, Scully builds the wall with “slabs” of color, rather than adorning it, abutting beams of gray and pink against posts of rust and blue, so that an architectural form materializes out of paint (A. Danto, Danto on Scully, Ostfildern, 2015, p. 92). In Scully’s hands, the painting, once understood as a window to another world, becomes a wall against which one must confront himself before charting a new path.
To underscore the inherent contradiction between material and function, Altamura engages with the language of architecture in both content and form by way of its diptych construction. Joining two panels in a medieval technique reserved for religious devotional images, Scully subtly invokes the humble disposition of the faithful and redirects it toward the introspective self. The artist provides the framework for the viewer’s meditation through individually defined panels that yield to collective implications when experienced as a complete work. Refined in stature yet pulsing with unlived potential, Altamura bears witness to Scully’s change of heart, pushing his work toward a more visceral exploration of “the architecture of our spirituality” (S. Scully quoted in N. Rifkin, Sean Scully: Twenty Years, 1976-1995, exh. cat. High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 1995, p. 43).