‘Sean Scully: Duane Street, 1981-1983’ Review: Painting Outside the Lines – Wall Street Journal

3 January 2025

Sean Scully is one of those artists who suffers from the good-news-bad-news situation of having an “iconic style.” The upside: His work is instantly identifiable (not to mention highly sought-after). The downside: When his paintings are exhibited, they’re usually drawn from his most recognizable periods, memory-holing important parts of his oeuvre in favor of more popular styles.

So it is a treat to encounter about a dozen works at Lisson Gallery that Mr. Scully made in the early 1980s in his Duane Street studio in the then-unfashionable neighborhood of Tribeca. This selection represents a groundbreaking period in his practice, and for those like me who often find the 79-year-old artist’s recent paintings lacking in inventiveness, is serves as a convincing reminder of his pivotal role in advancing geometric abstraction and progressing 20th-century art beyond Minimalism.

The Dublin-born painter moved from London to New York at age 30 thanks to a Harkness Fellowship, and the city’s thriving Minimalist movement (as well as its evangelists like Robert Ryman) soon held sway over him. Blending that style with Op art, Mr. Scully made work with crisp edges and taped lines, jettisoning much of the decorative aspects that had been hallmarks of his earlier creations, and he frequently deployed a staid palette. However, he became disenchanted with the strictures of this approach, feeling it was detached from the real world, and began to reincorporate color and loosen his brushwork. The linear structures were still there, but the sections of his work began to bleed into one another, heightening dimensionality and pushing an undeniably human element to the foreground.

This is the mode we find him in at Lisson, moving beyond Minimalism’s almost spiritual purity into something new. “Precious” (1981) sees him revisiting the painting-within-a-painting style he developed in the 1970s, but where his earlier works were mashups in which one style seemed to intrude on another, here he employs synthesis instead of dissonance, placing four carefully plotted vertical stripes at the meeting point of two horizontal sections. The thick slate-gray and burgundy bars of one part move toward more delicate lines of claret and orange in another, but the up-and-down rectangle in between doesn’t so much interrupt the other areas as mediates. Here we see Sean Scully as a master of color, taking a composition that could easily be chaotic and harmonizing it through his carefully curated palette.

Read more of Brian Kelly's review for The Wall Street Journal here.