Sean Scully, Landline Orient, 2016 / Private collection © Sean Scully, Photo Robert Bean
Irish-born, American artist Sean Scully’s acclaimed Landline series represents a dramatic shift in the work of one of today’s most important abstract artists. Sean Scully: Landline was recently on view at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and now traveled to the Wadsworth Atheneum.
Sean Scully: Landline traces the series’ expression through a variety of media, with nearly 50 oil paintings, pastels, watercolors, and photographs, and two layered aluminum Stack sculptures. A large-scale, 30 layer sculpture will be installed on the museum’s Main Street lawn in advance of the exhibition, in June 2018.
Sean Scully, Landline Zacatecas, 2015 / Private collection © Sean Scully, Photo Robert Bean
Sean Scully, Landline Yellow Line, 2015 / Private collection © Sean Scully, Photo Robert Bean
Sean Scully, Untitled (Landline), 2016 / Private collection © Sean Scully, Photo Robert Bean
Sean Scully, Untitled (Landline), 2016 / Private collection © Sean Scully, Photo Robert Bean
Sean Scully, Stack Colors, 2017 / Private collection © Sean Scully, Photo Robert Bean
Sean Scully, Landline 9.21.15, 2015 / Private collection © Sean Scully, Photo Robert Bean
Sean Scully, Land Sea Sky (#1), 1999 & Land Sea Sky (#3), 1999 / Private collection © Sean Scully, Photo Robert Bean
Sean Scully, Landline, 1999. Chromogenic print, Edition of 6 / Private collection © Sean Scully
Sean Scully, 4.13, 2013 / Private collection. © Sean Scully, Photo Robert Bean
Known for combining the geometry of European concrete art with the ethereality of American abstraction, Scully’s thick, gestural brushstrokes evoke the energy and beauty of the natural world. His Landline works are largely inspired by his years in Ireland, particularly his time looking out to the sea. In these moments, Scully saw the layers of the world pressed into the space in front of him, forming the stacks that would come to characterize this series. The expressive and unconstrained bands of color reach beyond abstraction and into the sublime, where the contours of landscapes unfold to reveal the physical and emotional dimensions of experience, trauma, and memory.
Sean Scully. Landline
February 23 – May 19, 2019 / Wadsworth Atheneum
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