Sean Scully, twenty years, 1976-1995

by Ned Rifkin

Sean Scully's large-scale canvases carry on the rich legacy of postwar American abstract painting in an age when much of the critical focus has turned to subject-driven art. Using a deliberately restricted vocabulary of lines or bands of color that allude to architectural elements such as portals, windows, and walls, Scully, an Irish-born, English-trained, naturalized American, has generated a significant, vibrant, and compelling body of work that is widely collected and internationally exhibited. Sean Scully: Twenty Years, 1976-1995 traces the evolution of his art through paintings and related works on paper spanning this important period of contemporary art, a time wherein Scully evolved from a painter whose work was severely hard-edge and minimal, to one whose bravura handling of paint and command of resonant color take nonrepresentational painting towards a decidedly humanistic end. This book, published to accompany a traveling exhibition organized by the High Museum of Art in Atla