Sean Scully: Wall Big And Small

For the latest exhibition in East Hampton, Lisson Gallery is pleased to present Wall Big And Small, featuring the first in a new series of Bonsai paintings by Sean Scully. Presented in dialogue with a recent Wall of Light painting, the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, and his second in East Hampton, reframes one of Scully’s most important bodies of work.

Sean Scully’s Bonsai 1, 2021, is an introduction to a new series by the artist that presents his prominent compositions of horizontal and vertical bands, tessellating blocks and shifting colors on a miniature scale. The work presented in East Hampton condenses the size of a quintessential Wall of Light painting, shrinking the stacks of rectangles while maintaining the hints of light through the fissures for which the series is known. The new work is shown alongside Wall Red Yellow, 2021, a recent, full-scale Wall of Light painting, shown for the first time, that continues the series first started by Sean Scully over three decades ago.

The series began after the artist made the first of several influential trips to Mexico in 1983, where he used watercolor for the first time to portray the patterns of light and shadows he experienced on the stacked stones of local walls and ruins. The ongoing group of works features piled rectangles of color, stacked in alternating horizontal and vertical formats with traces of space where light peaks through the aggregation.