Events

Sean Scully in conversation with Raphy Sarkissian about the underlying tenets of Scully's geometric abstraction on the occasion of the publication of his monograph Sean Scully: Material World.

PLEASE NOTE: This free event is first come, first served; RSVPs are encouraged. Seating is limited. Doors open at 5:30 pm.

“I believe that there is an abstract rhythmical structure that runs parallel to all life and that unconsciously binds us together.” —Sean Scully

Sean Scully: Material World was published on the occasion of a highly celebrated exhibition of the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen, held between September 2, 2022 and March 5, 2023. Acutely curated by Per Haubro Jensen, the Thorvaldsen Museum would become the first institution in Denmark to present a solo exhibition of the work of Sean Scully.

In this catalogue essay, Raphy Sarkissian unreservedly examines the compelling paintings, works on paper and sculptures of Sean Scully in relation to the prolific output and remarkable art collection of the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844).

Although the formalist elements circulating within the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin’s seminal text Principles of Art History usher Sarkissian’s interpretations of works by Scully, sculptures by Thorvaldsen and paintings Thorvaldsen had commissioned or acquired, the prescient ideas of Scully frequently come across as arbiters of meaning: “I do not subscribe to the grip of extreme geometry. I would call what I do a breathing order,” Scully has stated.

Through geometric painterliness practiced over the past half a century, Scully has single-handedly emancipated the autonomy of geometricized painting by mapping unending interactions of color and line—interactions that run parallel to the tactile and optical world around us, parallel to our ontology and materiality of the world.

This exhibition included around forty exceptional artworks by Scully and aimed to give an overview of his extraordinary oeuvre: in addition to select paintings and works on paper, visitors could see a series of distinct material-based large-scale sculptures created specifically to have a dialogue with the architecture of the Thorvaldsen Museum. This catalogue of the exhibition has become available in the United States recently.

Sean Scully was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1945 and today lives and works between New York, Bavaria, Aix-en-Provence and London.

Sean Scully’s work is in the collection of virtually every major museum around the world. In 2014, he became the only Western artist to have had a career-length retrospective exhibition in China. This led to his being awarded the International Artist of the Year Prize in Hong Kong in 2018.

2018-2019 also saw important solo exhibitions such as Landline at The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., which toured to the Wadsworth Atheneum, Connecticut, USA; Landline and other works at the De Pont Museum in the Netherlands; a retrospective titled Vita Duplex at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Germany; Sea Star at The National Gallery, London, and the first major exhibition of Sean Scully’s sculptures at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK. Eleuthera, Sean Scully’s new figurative paintings were given a solo exhibition at The Albertina, Vienna; the retrospective Long Light opened at the Villa and Collection Panza, Varese, Italy; and HUMAN, an exhibition of new paintings and sculpture was shown at San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, Italy, for the 58th Venice Art Biennale.

In 2020 the Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest opened Passenger, a major retrospective and his first exhibition in Central Europe, which traveled to the Benaki Museum, Athens, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia.

2022 was marked by the major fifty-year career retrospective Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in the USA, previously shown at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas in 2021, alongside three further retrospectives: Song of Color at the Langen Foundation, Neuss, Germany; Painting and Sculpture, at the Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej (CSW), Toruń, Poland; A Wound in a Dance with Love, MAMbo Museum of Modern Art of Bologna, Italy; and a further important solo exhibition Material World at the Thorvaldsens Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark.

The current exhibition Sean Scully at Houghton Hall—Smaller Than The Sky in the UK is a major exhibition of outdoor sculpture with paintings and works on paper set in the historic grounds and interiors of Houghton Hall, UK, and runs until 29 October 2023.

Raphy Sarkissian first encountered the provocative grids of Sean Scully in May 1993 in Soho, New York at Mary Boone Gallery on West Broadway. Sculptural in their physicality, monumental in scale and formalistically expressive, the sheer materiality and abrasive objecthood of these “relief paintings” of Scully would astoundingly emanate phantasmic luminosities and sensations of the incorporeal. In October 1995, returning to Mary Boone Gallery to witness the subsequent geometric abstractions of Scully, it became evident that Mondrian’s grid had been liberated and reinvented so as to salvage the medium of painting from the modernist and postmodern quandaries that would proclaim its demise. As the notable philosopher and prominent art critic Arthur C. Danto has stated, “Scully’s historical importance lies in the way he has brought the great achievement of Abstract Expressionist painting into the contemporary moment.”

Raphy Sarkissian is an independent scholar, art critic, artist and curator, whose democratic interest in “prominent” and “marginal” contemporary art spans over three decades. After experimenting with photography in Milan and matriculating at the International Center of Photography in New York, Sarkissian pursued fine arts at New York University, studying under Judith Barry, Peter Campus and Roselee Goldberg. Soon after completing his Master of Arts at New York University, he advanced his studies of art history at Columbia University and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Sarkissian’s recent art reviews have addressed works by Sean Scully, Liliane Tomasko, Phong H. Bui, Robert C. Morgan, Rachel Lee Hovnanian, Kaws, Gabriel J. Shuldiner, Richard Hearns and Anish Kapoor. One of Sarkissian’s essays on the output of Sean Scully has appeared in English and various translations in museum catalogues of retrospective exhibitions of Sean Scully held in Bologna, Zagreb and Budapest over the past half a decade.

Special thanks to Christine Pardue, Events Assistant Manager at Rizzoli Bookstore, for planning and facilitating this event.

Sean Scully: Material World

Thorvaldsen Museum, Copenhagen
Curated by Per Haubro Jensen

September 2, 2022 — March 5, 2023

Texts by
Per Haubro Jensen
Annette Johansen
Raphy Sarkissian

Graphic Design by
Martha Stutteregger

Languages: Danish and English

Pages: 120. Width: 24 cm. Height: 29 cm. Illustrations: 60. Hardcover.

First Edition Year: 2022
Hatje Cantz Verlag
Berlin
ISBN 978-3-7757-5280-0