Sean Scully – The Brooklyn Rail

18 December 2025

Sometimes it seems as if Sean Scully is showing almost everywhere. Well, he is! In mid-October I saw his exhibition placed against Giorgio Morandi in London. And then in early November, I looked at his show of new works in Manhattan. Set together, these two reviews of rather varied paintings and sculptures reveal the extraordinary range of his artistic interests.

Mirrors can be tricky. By replicating the visual world, mirror images are like figurative paintings. They ask us to consider: what is reality and what mere appearance? No wonder that philosophers from Plato to Arthur C. Danto have used them to explicate the nature of knowledge. Indeed, Danto refers to “mirrors as metaphors for art” in his treatise on aesthetics The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Some of Sean Scully’s mirror paintings play with, and complicate, this familiar idea by juxtaposing two fields of differently colored stripes. Then one needs to ask which is the original and which the mirror image. In fact, there is no unproblematic way to answer that question. At the Estorick Collection in London, as his exhibition title Mirroring signifies, Scully takes our thinking about this visual process of mirroring a natural step further. Art historians tend to speak of a painter as being influenced by their predecessors. What exactly does that mean when the two painters are very different, such as Morandi and Scully? When comparing them, it may be better to indicate how they complement each other. Let’s do that and speak of mirroring. We want to acknowledge that if Morandi influences how we see Scully’s art, now Scully also affects our experience of Morandi.

Read the full article by David Carrier for The Brooklyn Rail here.

Image: Sean Scully, The Artist, 2025. Oil and oil pastel on aluminium, 30 × 28 inches. © Sean Scully. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery.