Sean Scully, Different Places

SEAN SCULLY DIFFERENT PLACES

SEAN SCULLY DIFFERENT PLACES

CHÂTEAU LA COSTE in association with

KERLIN GALLERY

‘NO TRAVELLER RETURNS’ THE RESTLESS VISION OF SEAN SCULLY Kelly Grovier

According to family history, on 7 May 1915, John Scully, grandfather of the future artist Sean Scully, hanged himself to death from a beam above his cot in the Chatham Garrison of the Royal British Army, twenty miles outside London. A ‘traveller’ by occupation, so his death certificate would read, the elder Scully was among that last generation of Southern Irishmen whose notion of national identity would be stretched to snapping point by competing obligations. On the one hand, he was bound by the laws of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, which officially claimed him as its subject. On the other hand, a remote dream of an Irish Free State, still years away from being realized, agitated deeper allegiances.

Among the many threads tugging at Scully’s psyche was the promise of eventual Home Rule for his native Ireland by Prime Minister Lloyd George’s government: a disingenuous pledge conveniently postponed by the outbreak of war with Germany. Pulling in the opposite direction was the instinctive allure of immediate independence, demanded by Irish Republicans, whose calls, a year later, will erupt into armed insurrection in the Easter Rising of April 1916.

Within this heated historical context of conflicted selfhood, John Scully found himself a reluctant enlistee in the Royal British military. Facing imminent deployment across the English Channel to the killing trenches of war, Scully took the doomed decision to abscond.

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Captured and sentenced to be shot at dawn the following day, Scully resolved to take his unfortunate fate into his own hands. And so it was that on the same day that the English ocean liner RMS Lusitania was torpedoed and sunk by Kapitänleutnant Walther Schwieger’s U-boat, as Britain and Germany advanced their positions on the murky chessboard of the high seas, John Scully hoisted the colours of his own soul and defiantly declared himself the subject of no worldly regime.

Precisely how such painful knowledge percolates in the deep groundwater of an heir’s imagination is impossible to measure. Once equipped with such information, however, an observer of Sean Scully’s work may find it difficult to encounter a painting such as Union Blue, 2004, and its bold collision of chequered territories, without detecting an intense sensitivity to the irreconcilability of competing positions. As one’s eyes move from square to square, a suspicion slowly begins to build that the artist has rigged a match that must endlessly be fought but can never be won. The stymied contest of Union Blue plays itself out across an unbridgeable seam of tonally incompatible forces: the colonizer and the colonized, coercion and freedom, the body and the soul. Scully’s ambiguous canvas – at once an irresolvable board game and the riven flag of a divided territory – is the perfect symbol for a congenitally restless mind that, like its forebear, can ultimately only claim the state of exile as its legitimate home.

While neither the largest nor the earliest work in Sean Scully: Different Places (the inaugural show in Château La Coste’s newly refurbished exhibition space in the vineyard’s Old Wine Storehouse), Union Blue nevertheless unlocks the itinerant logic of the show’s design. The twelve painted works assembled for the exhibition take visitors on a journey from the show’s first work, Mooseurach, 2002 (which invokes the brooding rhythms of the Bavarian forest where the artist has a studio), to the sun-baked gold and haemoglobin red of Barcelona Green, 2013 (which absorbs the light of another city where Scully works), to the sombre

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vibrations of Wall of Light Angel, 2007, enveloping observers in its otherworldly gloam.

The concluding work in the exhibition, created earlier this year, Landline Inwards, with its meditative horizontality of dark stripes, will further amplify the stark contrast between the moods of Scully’s imagination and the evaporative atmosphere of the show’s luminous surroundings, punctuating Scully’s tendency to confront directly the tensions between the spaces he occupies.

Restlessness inscribed itself on Scully’s consciousness and imagination from a very early age. Born in Dublin on 30 June 1945, he was barely four years old before his family resolved to settle instead in London, following a series of frenetic ferryings back-and-forth between Britain and Ireland. Among the circumstances that etched estrangement deep into the young boy’s psyche in these formative days was the sudden disappearance of his father, who was incarcerated for eight months for having dodged mandatory military service during the Second World War. A conscientious objector to war and supporter of Ireland’s position of neutrality, the artist’s father was aware that he could only legitimately remain in London (to find work there and set up a family life) if he was willing first to surrender himself to a period of imprisonment for his earlier desertion. By cruel cosmic coincidence, Sean Scully’s father was sentenced to serve his detention in the very facility in south-east England where his grandfather, John Scully, had hanged himself thirty-four years earlier.

The repetition of punished conviction and enforced homelessness would score indelible patterns in Sean Scully’s sense of identity. No sooner had he begun to make a name for himself in the English art world, after attending schools in South London and Newcastle in his early twenties, than his incorrigibly impatient imagination craved stationing elsewhere.

Formative excursions to Morocco in 1969, to Massachusetts from 1972 to 1973 (on a John Knox Fellowship to Harvard University), and throughout Mexico in 1980, all preceded an eventual decision, in 1983, to take up American citizenship, whereby the artist added yet another

nationality to his by-now palimpsestic passport of being. Yet even formal emigration to New York failed to put an end to Scully’s incessant wanderings. Before long, he was working and teaching in Germany and setting up a studio too in Spain.

The feeling that emerges as one moves around the works that comprise Different Places is of witnessing a mind trying desperately to make the vibrant pieces of a disordered and disorderly world fit together – to make the universe make sense. Yet at every turn we discover the interposition of a dislocating element, a piece of the puzzle that is incapable of inserting itself comfortably into the whole. In the case of Figure in Blue, 2003, for example, the second painting that visitors encounter as they move clockwise around the room (starting from the entrance), the endeavour to perceive figuration from the refracted blueness in the top half of the work is confounded by the strange intrusion in the bottom half of a separate painting altogether (a canvas within a canvas) that appears to have wandered uninvited into the personal space of the larger stylized portrait. The result is a rather disorientating alienation within the broader abstraction of the work’s design: a curious colonizing of one work by another. But who is the encroacher, whom the encroached upon?

If that question seems rhetorically unanswerable, what are we to make of those posed by the ensuing work, Königin der Nacht, 2003, whose very title implies the chess-like stealth of a calculating figure of cold command? In the symbolism of Mozart’s opera, Die Zauberflote, the Queen of the Night would have been recognized immediately (especially by contemporary initiates in the secretive Masonic order to which the composer belonged) as a force that obscures true knowledge. Within the misty rules of Scully’s painting, however, are we to equate the clash of blinding yellow and obscurantist blacks with an endorsement of the Queen’s authority, or does it represent instead a subversive cracking of her code? The higgled matrix of paired and tripled blocks seems confident in its proposed ordering of the material and immaterial worlds: sky and earth, water and light. Yet the rationale that underlies its

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design and the patterns that regulate its arrangement cannot be derived from the notation provided. The work’s meaning is hermetically sealed within itself. While we may marvel at the depth of its beauty and the heraldic opulence of its hierarchies of colour, the work projects a royalty into which we can never hospitably be assimilated. However enchanting, this is a foreign land: an esoteric order to which we, like the artist himself, must forever remain outsiders.

On the wall facing Mooseurach, Figure in Blue, Königin der Nacht and Union Blue, visitors will discover a stretch of paintings that appears determined to reconcile the irreconcilable coordinates of these opening works and to construct, once and for all, an ideal place in whose light one can endlessly linger: an imagined realm where estrangement finally fructifies into belonging. But even the paradoxical formulation of the title for the series that dominates the works in this group, Wall of Light – a poetic contradiction in terms – seems mindful of the impossibility of ever truly concluding one’s search for home in the real world of substance and shadow. These are paintings that argue for a contentment in discontentment, a restfulness in restlessness, and a wilful suspension of disbelief in the suitability of this realm as habitation for the soul. In the meditative misalignments of mood and hue in the Wall of Light and Cut Ground works presented here, visitors may sense a slow shift towards something more philosophical or spiritual in Scully’s aesthetic journeying, and a more consistent effort to craft a mystical grammar. Dominating this component of the exhibition is the majestic Wall of Light Angel, whose sombrous assembly of greys, alabasters and deepest blacks is less aligned to the barriers that divide physical places in the here-and-now (‘walls’) than to a more diaphanous veil that separates this life from the next (‘light’).

Arguably no artist’s soul was more profoundly attuned to the anxieties of spiritual estrangement in this world than that of Vincent Van Gogh, who likewise sought desperately to harmonize the discordant light of his interior and exterior existences. It is only fitting, therefore,

that the visual keystone to Different Places should be a work inspired by the spirit of the late nineteenth-century post-Impressionist master: a new triptych, Arles-Nacht-Vincent, executed

by Scully earlier this year. The syncopated title of the three-panel piece, whose hyphenation jolts the observer from a Provençal place-name, to the German word for a period of time, to a Dutch forename, amplifies the restiveness of the three compositionally identical canvases.

Look closely and it soon becomes clear that each panel is an agitated anagram of the others in what comprises, collectively, a fidgety riddle of unfixable colour. Only in the plurality of refracted existence across a multiplicity of separate canvases does the work find its balance, as if conceding the impossibility of ever locating contentment in any one place in this world.

Also conceived especially for display on the occasion of Different Places is a new monumental Corten-steel outdoor sculpture entitled Boxes Full of Air (2015). The vast metallic armature of the work, which holds nothing but the shadows and light that fall through its open framework, stands in stunning contrast to Scully’s enormous permanent stone sculpture, Wall of Light Cubed (2007), which stretches across the landscape nearby. Though intrinsically liberating in its agape design, the conjured confinement of the steely structure (particularly when seen askance, as the spaces narrow) is evocative of incarcerating tropes. To move among its shifting silhouettes – now sliding together, now pulling apart – is to hear evaporate the distant clink of William Blake’s ‘mind forg’d manacles’, to feel the phantom heft of William Wordsworth’s ‘shades of the prison-house’ lifting at last, and to see ‘the constantly passing bars’ of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem The Panther, finally dissolve into nothingness.

What intensifies the effect of Boxes Full of Air is precisely that which has unsettled Scully’s imagination over the course of his entire life and career: the conviction that freedom is a state we can only find if we never stop searching for it.

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Mooseurach 2002 Oil on linen 152.4 × 167.6 cm 60 × 66 in

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Figure in Blue 2003 Oil on linen 200.5 × 185.5 cm 79 × 73 in

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Königin der Nacht 2003 Oil on linen 165 × 330 cm 65 × 129⅞ in

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Union Blue 2004 Oil on linen 228 × 366 cm 89¾ × 144⅛ in

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Big Yellow Robe 2.06 2006 Oil on linen 244 × 214 cm 96⅛ × 84¼ in

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Cut Ground Green 8.11 2011 Oil on linen 215 × 189.8 cm 84⅝ × 74¾ in

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Wall of Light Green Blue Black 2008 Oil on aluminium 215.9 × 190 cm 85 × 74¾ in

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Wall of Light Angel 2007 Oil on aluminium 280 × 350 cm 110¼ × 137¾ in

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Barcelona Green 2013 Oil on linen 157.5 × 172.7 cm 62 × 68 in

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Wall of Light Pink Red 2013 Oil on aluminium 215.9 × 190.5 cm 85 × 75 in

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Arles-Nacht-Vincent 2015 Triptych, oil on linen Each 160.5 × 160.7 cm 63⅛ × 63¼ in

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Landline Inwards 2015 Oil on aluminium 215.9 × 190.5 cm 85 × 75 in

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Barcelona 10.7.07 2007 Oil stick on paper 50 × 70 cm 19⅝ × 27½ in

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Barcelona 10.7.07 2007 Oil stick on paper 50 × 70 cm 19⅝ × 27½ in

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Barcelona 11.7.07 2007 Oil stick on paper 50 × 70 cm 19⅝ × 27½ in

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Barcelona 11.7.07 2007 Oil stick on paper 50 × 70 cm 19⅝ × 27½ in

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Barcelona 12.7.07 2007 Oil stick on paper 50 × 70 cm 19⅝ × 27½ in

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Barcelona 12.7.07 2007 Oil stick on paper 50 × 70 cm 19⅝ × 27½ in

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SS07 2007 Ink on paper 32 × 40.5 cm 12⅝ × 15½ in

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Vence 2007 Charcoal on paper 32 × 40.5 cm 12⅝ × 15½ in

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SS07 2007 Charcoal on paper 32 × 40.5 cm 12⅝ × 15½ in

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SS07 2007 Charcoal on paper 32 × 40.5 cm 12⅝ × 15½ in

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AIX 2007 Ink on paper 32 × 40.5 cm 12⅝ × 15½ in

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Wall of Light Cubed 2007 Ink on paper Each 27.9 × 21.6 cm 11 × 8½ in

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Wall of Light Cubed Quarry, Portugal 2007

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Wall of Light Cubed Quarry, Portugal 2007

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Wall of Light Cubed Installation, Château La Coste 2007

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Wall of Light Cubed 2007 Granite 4 × 20 × 8 m 13 × 65 × 26 ft

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Untitled 2011 Ink on paper Each 27.9 × 26.7 cm 11 × 10½ in

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Untitled 2011 Ink on paper Each 27.9 × 26.7 cm 11 × 10½ in

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Untitled 2011 Ink on paper Each 27.9 × 26.7 cm 11 × 10½ in

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Untitled 2015 Pencil on paper 27.9 × 21.6 cm 11 × 8½ in

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Landline Cubed 2015 Graphite on paper 27.9 × 21.6 cm 11 × 8½ in

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Untitled 2015 Ink on paper 27.9 × 21.6 cm 11 × 8½ in

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Air 2015 Ink on paper 29.7 × 21 cm 11¾ × 8¼ in

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Boxes of Air 2015 Ink on paper 29.7 × 21 cm 11¾ × 8¼ in

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Untitled 2015 Ink on paper 21.6 × 27.9 cm 8½ × 11 in

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Stack 2015 Watercolour and charcoal on paper 76.2 × 57.2 cm 30 × 22½ in

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Wall of Light Cubed 2015 Watercolour and charcoal on paper 57.2 × 76.2 cm 22½ × 30 in

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Air 2015 Ink on paper 21.6 × 27.9 cm 8½ × 11 in

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Boxes Full of Air Kunstgiesserei Sculpture & Production (Shanghai) 2015

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Boxes Full of Air Installation, Château La Coste 2015

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Boxes Full of Air 2015 Corten steel 3.7 × 15.2 × 6.1 m 12 × 50 × 20 ft

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SEAN SCULLY 1945 Born in Dublin, Ireland.

1949 Family immigrates to London.

1960 Apprentices at a commercial printing shop in London and joins a graphic design studio.

1962–65 Attends evening classes at the Central School of Art and Design, London.

1965–68 Studies painting at Croydon College, London.

1968–72 Bachelor of Arts at Newcastle University, England.

1969 Travels to Morocco.

1970 Awarded the Stuyvesant Foundation Prize.

1972–73 First visit to America as recipient of the John Knox Fellowship with a residency at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1973 First major solo exhibition at the Rowan Gallery, London. Show sells out.

1973–75 Teaches at the Chelsea College of Art and Design and Goldsmith’s, London.

1975 Moves to New York.

1977 First solo exhibition in New York at the Duffy-Gibbs Gallery.

1978–82 Teaches at Princeton University, New Jersey.

1980 Travels to Mexico.

1981 First retrospective at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England. Exhibition travels within the United Kingdom under the auspices of the Arts Council of Great Britain.

1981–84 Professor at Parsons The New School for Design, New York.

1983 Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Becomes an American citizen.

1984 Awarded an artist’s fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

1985 First solo American museum exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Exhibition travels to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

1987–90 Visits Mexico multiple times.

1989 First solo European exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. Exhibition travels to Palacio Velázquez, Madrid and Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. Shortlisted for the Turner Prize.

1992 Revisits Morocco to make a film on Henri Matisse for the BBC. Lectures at Harvard.

1994 New studio in Barcelona.

1998 Participates in a colloquium held in conjunction with the exhibition Richard Pousette-Dart (1916–1992) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Writes a text on Mark Rothko for The Times Literary Supplement.

1999 New studio in Chelsea, New York.

2000 Awarded Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Arts and Letters, London.

2001 Becomes a member of Aosdána, an Irish affiliation of artists engaged in literature, music and the visual arts. Sean Scully: The 90s exhibition and tour at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany; Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany; Instituto Valencia d’Arte Modern, Valencia, Spain.

2002–07 Professor of painting at Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich.

2003 Receives honorary PhD in Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston and from the National University of Ireland, Galway.

2004 Retrospective exhibition opens at Sara Hildén Art Museum, Tampere, Finland. Exhibition travels to Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Germany and to the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

2005–06 Sean Scully: Wall of Light exhibition and tour at The Phillips Collection, Washington; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; the Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio; the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York.

2006 Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane opens the Sean Scully Gallery, a permanent installation of paintings by the artist. Exhibition of prints at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

2007 Marries painter Liliane Tomasko.

2007–08 Sean Scully: A Retrospective exhibition and tour at Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Musée d’art moderne, Saint-Étienne, France, and the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma, Rome. Awarded honorary PhD, Doctor Honoris Causa, Universitad Miguel Hernández, Valencia. Elson Lecture at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

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2009 Retrospective exhibition and tour Konstantinopel oder die versteckte Sinnlichkeit. Die Bilderwelt von Sean Scully (Constantinople or the Sensual Concealed: The Imagery of Sean Scully) at MKM Museum Küppersmühle, Duisburg, and Ulster Museum, Belfast. Son Oisin is born.

2010–11 Tour of important early works: Works from the 1980s at VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow, Ireland; Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds, England; the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Germany. Awarded honorary PhD, Doctor of Letters, Newcastle University, England.

2011 Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, Wisconsin, opens their new expansion with solo exhibition of eight-part Liliane paintings and related works.

2012 Nine solo museum exhibitions from Philadelphia to Rome, including Grey Wolf: A Retrospective, at Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland; Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, Austria; the Alhambra Palace, Granada, Spain; the Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece.

2013 Becomes member of the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Solo museum exhibitions at Musée d’art classique de Mougins, France and Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, West Sussex, England.

2014 Becomes first Western Abstract artist to hold a major retrospective show in China, Sean Scully: Follow the Heart, Himalayas Art Museum, Shanghai. First contemporary artist to hold a major exhibition at the Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford University: Sean Scully: Encounters: A New Master Among Old Masters.

Receives honorary PhD from the Burren College of Art, National University of Ireland, Galway.

2015 Twelve major solo exhibitions, including shows at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing; Kunsthalle Rostock, Germany; Museum Liaunig, Neuhaus, Austria; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo; Palazzo Falier, Venice; National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin; Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland; the monastery of Santa Cecília de Montserrat, Barcelona; Château La Coste, Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade, France; Galeria Fatahillah, old Batavia, Jakarta, Indonesia.

Published by Château La Coste in association with the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin on the occasion of the exhibition SEAN SCULLY: DIFFERENT PLACES Château La Coste 4 July – 31 October 2015 Curated by Kelly Grovier 1000 copies ISBN: 978-0-9570070-4-8 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

All works © Sean Scully All words © Kelly Grovier All works are in private collections Cover: Stack, 2015 Watercolour and charcoal on paper 76.2 × 57.2 cm; 30 × 22½ in Publication design: Tony Waddingham Proofreading: First Edition Translations Ltd Printing: Cassochrome Bookbinding: Sepeli

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Photography: Neo Neo Inc., New York: pp. 7, 15–37, 41–69, 84–107, 132 François Deladerrière: pp. 2–3, 38–39, 72–74, 79–83, 113–125 Andrew Pattman: pp. 71, 76–77 Kunstgiesserei Sculpture & Production: pp. 108–111 DRONIMAGES: pp. 127–131 Special thanks are due to Mara McKillen, Daniel Kennedy, David Magill; Felix Lehner, Karl Rühle and everyone at Kunstgiesserei St. Gallen; Pablo Tache, Frank Hutter and Guillermo Pfaff.

Château La Coste 2750 Route de la Cride 13610 Le Puy Sainte Réparade France Tel: +33 4 42 61 89 98 www.chateau-la-coste.com Kerlin Gallery Anne’s Lane South Anne Street Dublin 2 Ireland Tel: +353 1 670 9093 www.kerlingallery.com