Large Solar Device

Artist Patrick Scott (1921 - 2014)

Date1964

MediumTempera on canvas

Dimensions234 x 153 cm

ClassificationsPaintings

Credit LineCollection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery. Donated by the Contemporary Irish Art Society, 1964. © The Estate of Patrick Scott.

Object number1233

DescriptionPatrick Scott was one of the first Irish exponents of pure abstraction. His early training as an architect has had an enduring influence on a career that spans six decades. In 1960 Scott won the Guggenheim Award and in the same year represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale.

The 1960s saw the artist move into his prime, first with his large device paintings where his life long obsession with the sphere began. Big Solar Device is one of a series of paintings in which Scott protested against the H-bomb testing of the day through forms that recall the deadly beauty of the bombs radiating halo. "The ambiguity of calling them (nuclear) devices and the reason for still testing weapons of mass destruction, which had already been used with such tragic consequences in Hiroshima and Nagaski, left me outraged", he said. In common with such paintings as Yellow Device and Purple Device, colour and ground are integrated to create a dynamic sphere of exploding colour from which radiate rivulets of paint that drip below a strongly defined horizon line. By the mid 1960s the device paintings gave way to the restrained poetry of the abstract Gold paintings today widely regarded as Scott's signature idiom.

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