For his first exhibition at Lisson Gallery Beijing, Sean Scully builds upon recent bodies of work, including his Wall of Light and Landline painting series, while also featuring two recent small-scale sculptural works made from rough-hewn stone blocks.
Throughout his 50-year-long artistic career, Scully has practiced a form of abstraction that aims to reshape the genre. His recent Landlines, of which there is a 2023 example subtitled Grey Blue in this exhibition, result from the hard-won layering and merging of oil pigments in coloured bands across the panel's aluminium surface, in the manner of sedimentary rock striations or horizon lines, suggesting meeting points between earth and sky or between nature and architecture.
Scully often blends and blurs the boundaries between his own bodies of work, showing not only a prowess in tonal balance and pictorial construction, but also an ability to revisit and recompose the essence of abstraction over time and across decades of production. Indeed, the other paintings in this show follow a square format and introduce Scully's newest group of Wall paintings. They recall not only the dry-stone and wooden walls found around the countryside of Ireland and Scotland that were the subject of some of his earliest photographs and striped works, but present complex woven passages of paint referencing and remixing some of Scully's previous compositions, with vertical inflections and doubled ‘bricks’ disturbing the otherwise neat symmetry of each square. “I’m trying to turn stone into light,” the artist has said of the manner in which these building blocks add up to something positive or “clear in its aspiration: to make a wall that is not a brutal divider.”
Read moreThe similarly square-formatted, multipartite sculptures, entitled Small Cubed (both from 2021) recall Scully's monumental, quarried works such as Wall Dale Cubed comprised of over 1,000 tonnes of stone or the rugged, shaped stacks of sand-coloured stone, Tower Light Cubed (2023), recently on view in the UK at Houghton Hall for his major show, 'Smaller than the Sky'. These more modest iterations of stone sculpture for Beijing are no less concerned with their own weight, heft and concentrated form, using gravity and geometry to bind themselves, while maintaining an irregular, abstract quality, due to the hand-cut nature of the materials, which disrupts any over-wrought or clean-cut rigour.
In addition to his show at Lisson Gallery Los Angeles (ending on 4 November) and major European museum shows in the past year, at Thorvaldens Museum in Copenhagen and at the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest, Scully's full-scale US touring retrospective, ‘The Shape of Ideas’, was seen at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Fort Worth in 2021-22. Indeed, Scully was the first Western artist to have a travelling survey in China in 2014, with ‘Follow the Heart: The Art of Sean Scully 1964 – 2014’ that went on display in Shanghai and Beijing – the last time his work was seen in depth in the city. Scully is also participating in the Chengdu Biennale, entitled ‘Time Gravity’ at Tianfu Art Park.
肖恩·斯库利 (Sean Scully) 将呈现他在里森画廊北京空间的首次个展「陆光之壁」(Wall of Light Land)。本次展览带来艺术家近期创作的《光之壁》(Wall of Light) 与《陆线》(Landline) 系列画作，以及两件由质感粗砺的石材构成的小型雕塑。
纵观其50年的艺术生涯，斯库利的创作旨在重塑抽象的流派。从展览中的画作《灰蓝陆线》(Landline Grey Blue，2023)，观众可以看到他最近的《陆线》系列作品是通过铝板上油画颜料的层叠和交融，呈现出类似沉积岩层或地平线的色彩条带，暗指大地与天空之间、自然与建筑之间的交汇。
斯库利常模糊其不同的绘画系列之间的界线，这既印证了他在色调平衡与图像构建方面的造诣，也体现出即便其创作生涯跨越数十年，他仍能重新审视并重构抽象本质的能力。除了《灰蓝陆线》以外，本次展览中的其他画作都采用了方形画布，均来自斯库利最新的《壁》(Wall) 系列。这些作品不仅追溯了爱尔兰和苏格兰乡村地区常见的干石墙和木墙，这些墙面曾是他早期摄影作品与带状绘画的主题；还参考并重新演绎了斯库利从前画作的一些元素，呈现出复杂交错的颜料笔触，用垂直纹路的抑扬变化和双层的“砖块”图形打破方形构图原本的对称性。“我试着‘点石成光’”，艺术家如是说。这些画中的模块最终组成为积极的事物，或者说“明确的愿景——即创造一面墙，但不是一种粗暴的隔断。”
展览中两件均创作于2021年的雕塑名为《小型立方体》，同样以方形为形态，并由多部分组成。它们回顾了斯库利创作过的巨大石材雕塑，比如以千吨石材构筑的《立方谷壁》(Wall Dale Cubed)；或是用表面粗糙、形态不一的沙色石块砌成的《立方光塔》(Tower Light Cubed，2023)，这件作品于斯库利2023年在英国霍顿庄园 (Houghton Hall) 的大型个展中展出。此次在北京展出的石雕作品相对小巧，但对于重量、分量与紧凑形态的关注丝毫不减。雕塑本身利用重力与几何学性质保持形态，又运用手工切割的材料以保留不规则的抽象质感，避免过于工整干净的生硬形态。
过去的一年里，斯库利曾在里森画廊洛杉矶空间举办个展 (展至11月4日)，也于欧洲重要艺术机构展出作品，包括哥本哈根托瓦尔森博物馆 (Thorvaldsens Museum)和布达佩斯匈牙利国家美术馆 (Hungarian National Gallery)。此外，2021年至2022年期间，斯库利在美国费城艺术博物馆 (Philadelphia Museum of Art) 和沃思堡现代美术馆 (Museum of Fort Worth) 推出巡回回顾展“思想的形状”(The Shape of Ideas)。2014年，斯库利成为首位在中国举办巡回回顾展的西方艺术家，其展览「随心而行：肖恩·斯库利艺术展，1964-2014」于上海和北京两地展开，那也是他最近一次在北京呈现的深度展览。2023年，斯库利的作品还于成都双年展「时间引力」中展出。
