Sean Scully Makes LA Deep

"I could have called this show 'In My Life," Sean Scully said at the press preview to "LA Deep" his new show at the Lisson Gallery in Los Angeles.

Scully recounted how having been born in Ireland, he attended university in Newcastle in England where he made his first paintings, which he described as "a combination of heat and the industrial revolution." After a summer spent in Morrocco, Scully returned to Newcastle to make a series of brightly colored paintings, which launched his career and took him to London.

His paintings caught the eye of a wealthy American, who, Scully said, "had made so much money he had to find a way to lose it." And so, decided to open a gallery which showed his work. Scully showed in Santa Monica in 1974 and in New York to which he moved the following year. In the space of a few years his life had changed completely.

Those first paintings, called Supergrid paintings, three of which from the era are on display in the current show, are a series of brightly colored overlapping horizontal and vertical thin stripes, hewing to very strict hard-edge lines. Looking at Blaze (1971), on exhibition, you see, a bravado composition of dizzying mastery that seems to almost exist in three dimensions.

Scully explained the obsessiveness it took to make those works. "I started my life as a typesetter in a print factory." Scully said," That makes it possible to make paintings like this because I was very disciplined and the discipline in my work has remained but over the years it's been married to romanticism." Which, he said, "is an unusual combination."

In New York, Scully fell in with the minimalists. Their influence and being in New York affected his work. "When I went to New York, I changed my work because I was aware that I was an immigrant," Scully said.

Scully talked about what it was like to in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the era of when New York as a city was facing financial difficulty – and Scully said that "the vanity of New York was that everyone was surprised and shocked." At the same there were a generation of German artists such as Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhad Richter, Joseph Beuys, A. R. Penck coming into prominence, to whom the art world shifted their attention.

Scully described the impact on the New York artist community as being like "being hit three punches and knocked out and up in hospital." It shook the New York art world, Scully said. "And it caused an enormous crisis for me." Scully felt he needed a way to break from minimalism.

"I was thinking about how one could rescue abstraction from this. I turned to my history as a figurative painter as having come from Europe, and I began to paint like a European… And when I did that the metaphors started coming into my mind and the forms began to expand. And the stripes turned into bodies, or tree trunks, or horizons, or blocks, or windows. The metaphors began to enrich the work. I started telling stories and giving paintings [names] like "by night," "by day," "long night" By changing how I painted had a massive effect… and then you got this real weird mixture of constructivism and romanticism. And of course, I could do it because I [had] lived it."

Scully's approach resulted in paintings that build up layers of color and in which the brushwork became less rigid, the stripes or color fields larger, the gestural more pronounced. He had found his own language.

"I always like to joke, you know, I was born in the wrong place at the wrong time because I was born in Ireland after the war, and we were homeless… we lived on the street. But then when I was in New York in 1980, … I was in the right place at the right time." Being in New York at that moment was the catalyst for finding his mature style. "I was in the perfect place."

The new works on exhibit, from 2022 and 2023, are a recognition of Scully's 50-year artistic journey. Revisiting those early works, Scully challenged himself to bring the past into the present. Several of the new works do that as diptychs in which a square space has been carved out of the center of the new works and in which there is a grid of stripes, not as obsessively tight as the early work, painted looser, with more emotion, set in a series of larger stripes, as if to say, "This is where I came from, this is where I am now."

"I think there's a lot of nostalgia and deep emotion in my paintings." Scully said.

There is also a large new work, Guadalupe, in which the orange background peeks out from squares of color fields in Scully's now signature style which communicates a deep and strong sense of emotion and well-being. "It was always my project to try and bring painting back into the realm of feeling."

"I've always thought that painting has a great tendency to become sentimental if it's not disciplined." Scully said. "But if there's too much discipline, then the painting "doesn't have anything to say. It doesn't touch anybody."

For Scully, his 50-year artistic journey has been not as much about what you see in his work as what it makes you feel.

Scully said he likes to think about the metaphor of the prince and the sleeping beauty and how he awakens her with a kiss, with emotion – and that, in some way, he is the prince, and the canvas is the sleeping beauty. "LA Deep" Scully's show at the recently opened Lisson Gallery is a wake-up call about his artistic journey from the dazzle of his youthful works to the emotion of his current canvases.