‘My work is a way of emotionalizing or individualizing or humanizing the structures that actually dominate us. That’s really the agenda in the work. We are living in a world made by walls and grids, a world of geometry and hyper-structures. My work is a way of dealing with that, and making it poetic, deep and profound.’
S. Scully and M. Gnyp, ‘Interview: Sean Scully’, in YOU, ME AND ART, January 2022
‘Matissian, vivid colors define the felted horizontal modules of Opulent Ascension (2019), a monumental edifice that articulated the interior space of the basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice in 2019. Over ten meters tall, this structural model incorporates so many of the inherent properties of painting, sculpture, and architecture, only to separate them from these typologies as well: here the felt support acts as a plinth that itself acts as a towering architectural construction. Light, color, and space condition the mobile participant’s experience, where the work invites the subject through its entryway into a soaring spatial realm whose absent ceiling recalls the oculus of the Pantheon in Rome.’
R. Sarkissian, ‘Sean Scully: A Wound in a Dance with Love’, in The Brooklyn Rail, September 2022
‘The Landlines are really an attempt to guide us to look at or feel the natural world – its importance, its beauty, its life affirming vitality. The Landlines have opened up a lot of possibilities with regard to color. The bands go from one side of the painting to the other so the paintings seem to pulsate.’
S. Scully, ‘On The Horizon: A Conversation with Sean Scully’, in The 12 / Dark Windows, exh. cat., New York: Lisson Gallery, 2021, p. 9
‘Scully’s walls are incorporeal and material at the same time: they are attached to the human world, yet they also seem to transcend it. The walls are built from light and colour, but also from a mass of solid paint, and they constantly open up new visual and semantic layers, even as they close in on themselves. Simultaneously one can interpret them as closed and open structures, as formations of concealment and revelation.’
D. Fehér, ‘Behind the Wall: Figures and Grounds in the Art of Sean Scully’, in Sean Scully: Passenger – A Retrospective, exh. cat., Budapest: Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery, 2020, p. 9
‘My work is based on immersion. I am immersed in a very different set of parameters and aspirations. I am taking on the history of art, I'm immersed in it, and I'm immersed in what I make. I am what I make in other words; there is no difference.’
S. Scully and R. E. Davis, ‘Interview with R. Eric Davis: Why do you Make Art?’, in Journal of Contemporary Art, 1999, n.p.
‘The Passenger paintings form an enigmatically beautiful group of works in Sean Scully’s oeuvre. In these pictures, the ground has another picture inside it – an inset, as the artist calls it – , which in every case is shifted from the composition’s vertical axis of symmetry. It is as though the inset had moved or were still in motion. The insets can be interpreted as lingering moving figures, solitary human figures passing across the horizon.’
D. Fehér, ‘THE PASSENGER: An Introduction’, in Sean Scully: Passenger – A Retrospective, exh. cat., Budapest: Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery, 2020, p. 121
‘What is astonishing about the works on paper is the way Scully has been able to adapt the spirit of his formal vocabulary to the quite different demands of other media – like watercolour, for example, or pastel. The bars and stripes and checkerboard squares of oil paintings have a layered quality – they are visibly built up, layer upon layer, with the submerged layers allowed to show through the final one.’
A. C. Danton, ‘Sean Scully and the Art of Painting’, in Sean Scully: Passenger – A Retrospective, exh. cat., Budapest: Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery, 2020, p. 93
‘There’s a restlessness in me and I’m not willing just to settle into something unchecked.So each part of this is checking the other or critiquing the other. It’s the whole world in a sense. It’s not only two different kinds of illusion or space but it’s two different traditions. That is really the big argument in the painting.’
S. Scully, ‘Firing On All Cylinders’, in Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas, exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020, p. 25
‘I’d build up something that was based on the grid, as you can see, or the cross, the intersection of things, the one thing holding together another thing. There’s a kind of binding in the early paintings – there’s always a cross of one kind or another, a diagonal crossing, or weaving, or a vertical one, but there’s always a cross – and what occurred to me recently is that when I came to the USA my cross became uncrossed.’
S. Scully, ‘Duncan Phillips Lecture, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 18 October 2005’, in Inner: The Collected Writings and Selected Interviews of Sean Scully, Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2016, p. 183
Unless otherwise stated:
© Sean Scully. Photo: courtesy of the artist
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