LA Deep

Status

For Sale

Price

On request

Collect24 Art ID

C24-154416

‘Sean Scully: LA Deep’, published on occasion of the exhibition of the same name, 23 Sep – 4 Nov 2023, Lisson Gallery, Los Angeles. Newspaper clippings, photographs and more accompany a look back on 50 years of colourful geometrical paintings from Irish-born artist Sean Scully (born 1945). The career spanning publication reveals formal and conceptual resonances between his earliest grid paintings and his equally innovative recent large-scale works. Scully’s so-called Supergrid series of works began while still a student in London and Newcastle in the UK during the 1960s, progressing towards a sophisticated language of overlapping, interwoven stripes painted between taped boundaries. Influenced by his tutor Ian Stephenson, whose dripped and dotted paintings featured in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Swinging Sixties film Blow Up, Scully began working on his own complex, focus-pulling compositions that likewise refused to fully reveal themselves at first sight, allowing only glimpses into its structure and necessitating prolonged viewing times. In epic feats of labor and painterly engineering, Scully built up dozens of horizontal and vertical lines, only to intensify this grid with multiplying layers of crisscrossing diagonals, creating expansive panels that exceeded even his tall frame and bodily span.