Externes Schreiben
Yüklə 123,84 Kb.
|
|
Information Sheet SEAN SCULLY Retrospective 22 July to 7 October 2012 Contents Exhibition Facts ……………………………………………………………………………. 3 Press Text …………………………………………………………………………………… 4 Biography ……………………………………………………………………………………. 5 Room Texts .……………………………………………………………………………....... 6 Catalogue Foreword ………………….…………………………………………..…….….. 20 Press Images ……………………………………………………………………………….. 23 Exhibition Facts Exhibition Title: SEAN SCULLY. Retrospective Exhibition Period 22 July to 7 October 2012 Opening Saturday, 21 July 2012, 7 p.m. Press Conference Friday, 20 July 2012, 11 a.m. Venue LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz, huge exhibition hall Curator Brigitte Reutner Exhibits 37 paintings and 7 photographs Cooperation The exhibition is the result of a cooperation with the Kunstmuseum Bern, where it was shown from 9th March to 24th of June, 2012. Catalogue The exhibitions are accompanied by the catalogue SEAN SCULLY. Grey Wolf – Retrospective in german and english language. Ed. By Matthias Frehner and Stella Rollig. With essays by Stella Rollig, Matthias Frehner, Annick Haldemann and Brigitte Reutner, as well as numerous illustrations, 208 pages, Price € 28,-. ISBN 978-3-86859-183-5 S  upport The exhibition is supported by Raiffeisen Landesbank Oberösterreich.
Room Texts are available in german and english. Edited and texts by: Brigitte Reutner, Dunja Schneider Kontakt Ernst-Koref-Promenade 1, 4020 Linz, Tel. +43(0)732/7070-3600; info@lentos.at, www.lentos.at Öffnungszeiten Di–So 10–18 Uhr, Do 10–21 Uhr, Mo geschlossen (außer 9.4.) Eintritt € 6,50, ermäßigt € 4,50 Pressekontakt Mag.a Nina Kirsch, Tel. +43(0)732/7070-3603, nina.kirsch@lentos.at Available at the Press Conference: Sean Scully, Artist Stella Rollig, Director LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz Brigitte Reutner, Curator Helmut Schützeneder, Raiffeisen Landesbank Oberösterreich Press Text The exhibition Sean Scully is the first major solo exhibition of the artist in Austria in over ten years. With the presentation of about fifty paintings and photographs, LENTOS shows an extensive cross-section of the work by the Irish-born artist, who lives today in New York City, Barcelona and Bavaria. In Scully’s early work, a grid system with multiply overlapping color stripes results in unusual optical effects. In the course of the 1980s the artist developed a form of painting the emphasizes the brush strokes. Hard edges are undermined in the painting, contours merge with one another. Lighter stripes are effectively contrasted with darker ones. The resulting dynamic is enhanced with an additional tension through the carefully calculated coloration. Scully’s large format, sometimes multi-part paintings and his picture-in-a-picture combinations are among the icons of the abstract painting of the 20th and 21st century.
The exhibition SEAN SCULLY. Retrospective is Sean Scully’s first major solo exhibition in Austria in over ten years. With the presentation of about fifty paintings and photographs LENTOS shows a comprehensive cross-section of the Irish-born artist’s oeuvre. As an artist with European roots, with his finely nuanced paintings Sean Scully continues the tradition of painting, having knowledgeably traced its history back to the early Renaissance. Scully probes how painting can accompany life, that of the painter as well as of his audience: as a store of memories, a poetic afterimage of what has been seen, an expanded space of possibilities.
Acrylic on canvas, private collection In 1969 Scully traveled to Morocco for the first time. The stripes and colors of the local weaving and the light of the south profoundly impressed him. The painting is one of the artist‘s early works. It shows influences from Optical Art (cf. Glossary) and from Geometrical Abstraction (cf. Glossary). It was executed in acrylic technique with an airbrush and adhesive tape.
Acrylic on canvas, private collection As a student the artist painted large-format pictures showing a complicated, intersecting system of lines and grids. This in turn creates a multi-layered, optical field.
Acrylic on canvas, private collection In 1972–73 Scully continued his studies at the Harvard University in Cambridge, USA, where he experimented with new techniques. In the lower area of the painting, two fields evince a structure similar to the background in the other fields. The painting Inset #2 thus paves the way for the disintegration of the geometrical grid structure. Following his return from the US, Scully exhibited at the Rowan Gallery in London. During this first solo exhibition the 28-year-old artist sold all the paintings presented. To me, communication means … Communication means „communicate“ and this painting has a subject, an obvious subject. It’s a woven, non-geometric insert, falling into a virtual, again cyber-light city landscape and this gives the painting a strange, difficult, and fascinating quality. It’s quite a crazy painting. Black on Black, 1979 Oil paint over acrylic on canvas, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid In 1975 Scully relocated to the US. In 1979, while working on Black on Black, he taught as a professor at the Princeton University, New Jersey. With the emphatic reduction to two differently bright shades of black, he takes up ideas from Minimal Art (cf. Glossary) in Black on Black.
Oil on canvas, private collection Backs and Fronts is considered one of Sean Scully‘s key works. The work is six meters long and consists of eleven panels. The outside edges are stepped, so that single parts of the picture optically advance or recede. Minor overlaps in color on the contours of the stripes imbue the picture motif with a lively vibration. For my development, this picture means … ... a significant combination and an equally significant declaration of what I would do in the following decade. I am making relationships that seem difficult, arbitrary. The Bather, 1983 Oil on canvas, private collection In 1983 Scully became a US citizen. With large format paintings like Backs and Fronts, The Bather and Outback he attracted the attention of the art world. Participation in the legendary group exhibition An international survey of recent paintings and sculptures at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 1983 contributed to the artist‘s growing international reputation.
Oil on canvas, private collection Important museums began to acquire and exhibit Scully’s paintings in the 1980s. In the course of his artistic development, the artist’s pictures became increasingly corporeal, architectonic and more direct in statement.
Oil on canvas, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Donation of the Burnett Foundation Beginning in 1979 Scully gave several newly created works the title Catherine. The artist initially chose classical pictures for this series, later they were more expressionist or experimental works. What they all have in common is that they are dedicated to a certain specific woman.
Oil on canvas, private collection Day Night works entirely with color values between white and black. The representation of light thus advances into the foreground. The composition consists of three gradated parts. The middle panel is raised and approaches the viewer, whereas the two side parts recede. The division into three parts takes up the idea of the medieval triptych (cf. Glossary) and imbues the works with an aura of the sacral. Day Night tells in three sequences how the day moves into the distance to make way for night. The effect of light in paintings by Caspar David Friedrich … ... is extremely subtle. On one hand his paintings seem simply illustrative, yet the quality that elevates them is the edges between things. One can say this emphatically about my work. My work depends always on the edges between things. Union Black, 1995 Oil on canvas, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf Scully’s compositions demonstrate the relationships between the individual parts of the picture. Interwoven colors and forms thus lead from one point of the painting to a more distant one. Like the figure of the knight in a game of chess, they lead the viewers right across the entire picture space. At the same time, the color black is a consistent component.
Oil on canvas, LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz There was already a solo exhibition of the artist in 1997 in the New Gallery of the City of Linz (predecessor institution of the LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz). The painting Uriel was acquired for the collection at the conclusion of the exhibition. Uriel is the name of an archangel.
Oil on canvas, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth Wall of Light Desert Night arises before the viewer like a restlessly flickering curtain of light. The contours blur, giving way to an overall impression of shimmering forms. The painting seems as light, fragile, ephemeral and incorporeal as a mirage.
Oil on canvas, private collection From 2002–2007 Scully was professor for painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He moved into a studio in the idyllic Bavarian foothills of the Alps. Yellow glows in several field in Yellow Mask. Scully associates this color with madness, jealousy and sex. The mask is a social necessity … ...to make certain actions possible, that would not be possible were one unmasked. In that sense, the mask becomes like a medium in a way, such as painting. Grey Wolf, 2007 Oil on aluminium, Kunstmuseum Bern The creation of the painting was documented with the film Grey Wolf by Hans A. Guttner. The film premieres in LENTOS on 26 July 2012 at 7:00 pm, following the guided tour with the curator Brigitte Reutner.
Oil on aluminium, private collection For Sean Scully, painting is a sensual, material act. According to his own statement, with the oil paint the artist lays a skin over the body of the image made of aluminium. Floating Painting Sky blocks the path of the viewer like a cross-bar. Corporeality is no longer feigned here with painterly means. It is really there.
Oil on canvas, private collection For Scully the window is not only an architectural element. Instead it forms the link between two realities. Just as some people consider the eyes as a mirror to the soul, a window can mediate between interior and exterior space in many different contexts.
Oil on aluminium, private collection Paintings from the series Robe Paintings have an even grid as basic structure. They were originally painted on canvas, to which the designation Robe refers. In the way he works, Scully feels very close to the Italian painter Titian. Tiziano Vecellio (born between 1488 and 1490 in Pieve di Cadore, died 1576 in Venice) is considered one of the most important painters of the Italian Renaissance.
Oil on copper, private collection The work consists of twelve three-part picture works. The interrelationships of differently bright bars represent a continuous transformation. The mood changes from the reflected light of the last golden hues of late autumn to a misty gray November day.
Oil on canvas, private collection The title reveals that Sean Scully draws lines in an underground, thus dividing it into single fields. This is also shown by photos of sand drawings made in 2010 on Islamorada before the southern tip of Florida. They document this artistic act, which wind and waves have turned into transient art.
Oil on canvas, private collection The small format canvas work is one of the most recent in the exhibition. It was made in Scully’s studio in the Bavarian foothills of the Alps. When the two curators discovered it for the exhibition in the artist’s studio, Scully picked up a pen and signed it …
… the world of color is released and the space in the painting becomes significantly flatter. Sean Scully’s Photographs Scully’s photo series were created during his travels to Scotland, Ireland, Germany, France, Mexico, Morocco, the Dominican Republic and to Mallorca. In 1979 he took a series of photos for the first time of ten doors in Sienna. The doors he chose were not from noble palaces of the Tuscan city. Instead the artist was on his way through side streets little frequented by tourists. Scully says that when he took the pictures, he knew exactly what would be seen in the photo. While he concentrated in the beginning on doors, he expanded the picture segment in the 1980s to entire fronts of houses. He took pictures of dilapidated city houses and huts, stone houses and half-decayed barns. For his photo series Scully searches the real world for compositions of horizontals and verticals. He concentrates on a two-dimensional arrangement of the visual motif that is reflected in a grid system: a grid system drawn by life itself. Scully’s paintings and photographs mutually comment on one another. Looking at the large format pictures, one sometimes feels reminded of sequences from neorealistic films. Pictures of an unpretentious world, selected by a painter whose paintings allow soft forms, in-between stages, blur filters and are endlessly open to interpretation. Glossary Abstraction: Strictly speaking, abstraction involves an art form which simplifies or schematizes the object of imitation, but still regards the basic form of that object. Much non-western and tribal art is abstract, as representations of human bodies and animal forms, for example, are still recognizable as such, although no attempt has been made to imitate those forms faithfully. Computer-Cyberspace: The computer has attained a new significance for art since the early nineties with computer animation, as it enables perspectival spaces and figures as models of perfect illusion. Geometrical Abstraction: Creation of an artwork following mathematical rules, making direct use of the “concrete” image elements surface, line, volume, space and color.
Conceptual Art: In Conceptual art, the final art object is usually irrelevant, and artists use it as a means of attacking the commercialization of easel-painting and other forms of gallery art. Conceptual art has also privileged the ideas of artists, as conception is more important to it than perception, and the creative processes of the artists have been seen to be allimportant. Conceptual art takes many forms: the written word, the photograph or the video. Inset: Something placed in or within something else; insert. Minimalism, Minimal Art: The apparent simplicity of Minimalist art hides the complexity of its intellectual structure. While the work may exhibit a ‘minimal art content’, it challenges the beholder to experience a layered and complex aesthetic response based on each individual’s expectations and prejudices. In this way an artwork with minimal content demands of the beholder a maximal response, and perhaps for this reason Minimalism is often seen, at least in popular opinion, as a difficult and intractable movement best discussed within the narrow confines of the art world. Optical Art: Optical art works by focusing interest exclusively on the question of visual perception while reducing to insignificance any potential interest in subject matter and avoiding a gestural handling of paint liable to draw attention back to the physicality of the painting. Triptych: A picture, often a portable altarpiece intended for private devotion, consisting of a central panel with two hinged wings which can be closed over the central image for protection. Zen: Current of Buddhism. “Zen is not something exciting, but rather concentrating on everyday tasks.” (Shunryu Suzuki) Corresponding entries in English are taken from: The Bulfinch Guide to Art History. A Comprehensive Survey and Dictionary of Western Art and Architecture, General Editor Shearer West. Boston u.a. 1996 Quotations (on the wall) (in chronological order) Backcloth, 1970 Acrylic on canvas, private collection To me, Concept Art of the 70s means … … a tremendous interest in procedure, a ritual, an attempt to bring back a kind of ethical morality and a making of art and accepting the visual results of that procedure. Diagonal Inset, 1973 Acrylic on canvas, private collection You can hang it however you want, … … you can hang anything however you want You can hang Rembrandts “Nightwatch” upside down if you want. But I prefer to give it a sense of weight and place. So I put the insets at the bottom so that they are surrounded by a grid. Hidden Drawing #2, 1975 Acrylic on canvas, private collection What is hidden is … … all the drawing that you can’t see. So a painting is, instead of being illusionistic, it becomes archaeological. But again, very interested in overlapping simultaneous systems. Outback, 1984 Oil on canvas, private collection Order and chaos … … are creative and combined in the same person. It is an example of the divided self. Pale Fire, 1988 Oil on canvas, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; Museum purchase Sid W. Richardson Foundation Endowment Fund “Pale Fire” tells of …. … a perfect ground which could be likened to the immaculate American flag, polluted by a dark and uncertain window which now seems very prophetic. Africa, 1989 Oil on canvas, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid Rhythms are intervals of time … Well, I can only agree with you. Africa has a dark, broody, dusty light, and it reminds me of the soil and the sand of Africa, and the window which gives relief is very hazy. Hammering, 1990 Oil on canvas, Kunsthalle Bielefeld Seeing the brush stroke … … allows you to follow its narrative. And a narrative is an insistent kind of drumming, hammered out in black and white. Catherine, 1991 Oil on canvas, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas The harmony in the composition … ...comes from competition rather than accommodation. The painting is classical and it’s strong, somewhat challenging, the elements are put in simultaneous existence having to declare themselves again and again for their existence in the painting. Between Figures, 1992 Oil on canvas and steel, private collection What is between the figures? The bridge. So the painting is concerned with two inserts, which are the figures, and in between them is a panel that conciliates between them, brings information back and forth between them. It allows you to pass from one end of the painting to the other, and for that you need a bridge. Lucia, 1992–1996 Oil on canvas, BAWAG Foundation, Wien Lucia is the name … … of a painting by Caravaggio. This is a painting of pure revenge. I was in Sicily trying to see Caravaggio’s painting in Santa Lucia. And typically in Sicily they open the museum when they feel like it. Since I never got to see the painting, I painted my own. Stare Red Yellow, 1997 Oil on canvas, private collection, Paris Tell us more about the couple in terms of a human relationship. “Stare” is something that stares back at you. You stare at it, it stares back at you. And these two figures are the same, but because they are conditioned by the context, they are changed. This of course is a metaphor for how human beings are profoundly made and affected by the contrast. Human beings are not sacrosanct. Landline Black, 2010 Oil on canvas, private collection Where have you “landed”? On a very austere, beautiful island of contemplation. Small Wall of Light Light Blue, 2010 Oil on canvas, private collection When the sky comes through the cracks in the wall, … … it humanizes it in some way, makes it accessible. This little painting is a landscape rearranged into a loose grid. Wall of Light Golden Brown, 2010 Oil on aluminium, private collection A sea of honey … … would be a very restricted palette. Thus the sense of moving the material around becomes more powerful. The more restricted the palette, the more powerful becomes the sense of hand and brushstroke and edge-making. And in this painting the color is on the edge of becoming monochromatic. Wall of Light Cream Magenta, 2010 Oil on canvas, private collection What is fascinating about the painting is a muted luminescence. Which feelings do you associate with the picture ? I associate this picture with the end of a day on a farm in the deep countryside. Cut Ground Blue Pink, 2011 Oil on canvas, private collection, Switzerland What is the painting about ? It is a painting of great color complexity. The color is both bright and dark. Falling and Rising. A dark but vital light. Cut Ground Yellow Blue 6.11, 2011 Oil on canvas, private collection Not everything can be clearly recognized in the mist … … which is its poetic charge. That’s why we are drawn to it, because it gives us simplification. And this little painting travels between chromatic intensity and romantic mist. Catalogue Foreword August 2010. We arrived in the little village from opposite directions. We had agreed to meet in Sean Scully’s studio in Bavaria. It was Scully who had brought us together. Independently of each other, we had both been working on the idea of dedicating a major retrospective exhibition to Sean Scully in our museums, the Kunstmuseum Berne and the LENTOS Kunstmuseum in Linz. As a project it was long overdue, eagerly anticipated by all who have followed Sean Scully’s art with curiosity and passion. And yet, at first sight, Scully’s work does not appear to suffer from a lack of public exposure – or from a lack of publications. He exhibits his work continually. Scully’s biography lists no fewer than 216 solo exhibitions between 1972 and late 2011 / early 2012; and then there are the joint and group exhibitions that add up to about twice that number. But most of these exhibitions have been devoted to a single group of works, a thematic complex or a specific period, and thus do not present the major survey which we had in mind. On that August day, the two of us were both driven by the desire that is probably the most relevant, the most urgent motif of any curator: to see with our own eyes how, with which movements, with which changes and transitions Scully’s oeuvre has developed over more than four decades. We each possessed in our collections a representative work to which we felt a particular affinity: Grey Wolf of 2007 in the Kunstmuseum Berne and Uriel of 1997 in the LENTOS. The drive from the nearest major town to Mooseurach took us through Bavarian countryside : past fields, woods, and pastures of grazing cattle. Scully the artist loves the contrasts between the three places in which he now lives and works in turn: New York, Barcelona, and Bavaria. Having been born in Ireland and having grown up in the unattractive south of London, today Scully seems to have secured for himself the best living and working conditions in both the Old and the New World. However, if we expected to find a rural idyll in a farmhouse, reality soon made it clear to us that the con ditions for his painting were the determining factor in Scully’s choice of where to live. We arrived not at a farmhouse, no cosy little complex of snug living rooms, but rather an industrial building with light, spacious rooms in which the living and working areas of Scully and his wife, the Swiss painter Liliane Tomasko, lie directly next to each other. The latest large-format works hung on the walls; some were still being worked on and some made use of the technique that Scully preferred during that summer : oil on aluminium. We could see that the paint application had become freer in comparison to earlier works. Most of the pictures consisted of rectangular patches of color – the typical stripes had given way to larger units of color. While we followed the artist into his archive in order to find the earliest available works, we realized at once that we could count on some new works between that visit and the start of our exhibitions in 2012. And that is exactly what happened. The most recent works which we are showing in this exhibition were completed just a few months ago. Sean Scully is a very productive artist. In January 2012, the catalogue raisonné on his website listed more than 1,200 paintings, starting with the realistic depiction of three succulents in a pot, Cactus of 1964, and continuing to the Cut Ground… series of 2011. And that does not include the works on paper or the photography and sculptures. The exhibition – which we have put together with considerable support from the artist himself and his assistants Arturo Rucci and Frank Hutter, together with the curators Annick Haldemann (Bern) and Brigitte Reutner (Linz) – takes as its starting point Scully’s decision in favor of geometrical-abstract painting. Soft Ending of 1969 is the oldest work in the exhibition; from it a trajectory arches forward into the present, with virtually every year represented by a characteristic work. Annick Haldemann and Brigitte Reutner worked on the questions, which together with Scully’s answers provide an intellectual basis for every work in this book. In Scully’s art we can detect the links to earlier models, intellectual and formal benchmarks – Matisse, Mondrian, Pollock, and Rothko – but with his reduced, apparently simple form language he has created a unique visual identity which links together his entire oeuvre. The viewer who wishes to assess this oeuvre in its entirety will need time. But even those who focus their attention on a single picture will encounter a great, inimitable artist whose works convey an existential, a spiritual dimension which is rare in the contemporary art of today. Scully is not a postmodern artist who disguises the seriousness of his own aims through quotations and irony out of consideration for an (art) world focused on coolness and hedonism: achieving the best that we can be, what we can think and create – and understanding that which repeatedly hinders us, which inhibits and injures us. The artist is always present in his works : in the painting with the traces of his hand, and in the picture titles with hints of autobiographical references. Each work forms an interface between the personal and the universal. It is at this point that the specific experience which Scully’s art makes possible takes place. We should like to thank all those who have worked on this exhibition and this publication. We are grateful first and foremost to Sean Scully for his help, his generosity, and for the inspiration he has given us. And our genuine thanks also go to the lenders for entrusting their works to us for the duration of these exhibitions. The Board of Trustees and the management of the Kunstmuseum Bern would also like to express its thanks to the Credit Suisse, the partner of the Kunstmuseum Bern, for its trust and generous support for the exhibition and the catalogue, as well as to the team responsible for the realization of the exhibition under the direction of René Wochner. The LENTOS Kunstmuseum would like to thank the Raiffeisenlandesbank Oberösterreich, which regularly provides generous support for the museum’s unusual projects. Thanks and recognition for the realization of the exhibition are due to the museum workshop team under the direction of Andreas Strohhammer. Stella Rollig Matthias Frehner Director LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz Director Kunstmuseum Bern Press Images Some of the press images are also available for downloading at www.lentos.at.  
Blaze, 1971 Private collection Photo: © Sean Scully
Sean Scully Inset #2, 1973 Private collection Photo: © Sean Scully
Backs and Fronts, 1981 Private collection Photo: © Sean Scully
Pale Fire, 1988 Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas Museum purchase, Sid W. Richardson Foundation Endowment Fund Photo: © Sean Scully
Catherine, 1991 Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas Photo: © Sean Scully Sean Scully Uriel, 1997 LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz
Sean Scully Grey Wolf, 2007 Kunstmuseum Bern Photo: © Sean Scully Sean Scully Wall of Light Golden Brown, 2010 Private collection Photo: © Sean Scully Sean Scully Cut Ground Yellow Blue 6.11, 2011 Private collection Photo: © Sean Scully 
Sean Scully, 2009 Photo: © Sean Scully 
Sean Scully Untitled Valencia, Spain, 2002 C-Print on alu-dibond Private collection Photo: © Sean Scully
 
Photo: © maschekS.
curator Brigitte Reutner Photo: © maschekS.
Photo: © maschekS. 15. Exhibition view SEAN SCULLY. Retrospective LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz Photo: © maschekS. 
 LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz, A-4021 Linz, Ernst-Koref-Promenade 1
Tel: +43 (0)732.7070-3600 Fax: +43 (0)732.7070-3604 www.lentos.at Yüklə 123,84 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
|
