Sanda

Artist Sean Scully (b. 1945)

Date1992

MediumOil on canvas on panel

Dimensions101.6 x 91.4 x 5.7 cm

ClassificationsPaintings

Credit LineCollection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery. Purchased, 1994. © Sean Scully.

Object number1830

DescriptionSince the beginning of his career, Scully's work has been characterised by strong formal linear composition. Although one could class Sean Scully's work of the late 1970s and early 1980s as minimal, he himself rejects such a label, 'I think there is a significant difference between what the Minimalists are doing, which I think of as puritanical art movement, an art movement that was really about taking all the smoke and dirt out of art, cleaning it up and what I am doing. The difference I think is in the degree of romance in the work.' Scully's tightly controlled compositions have an intensity of feeling that is unique in such abstract art. There is a raw energy in his work, which is sustained through this controlled juxtaposition of colours. His early works are composed of thin grid-like structures in subdued colouring and as his career develops the stripe is emboldened with luscious colours and striking contrasts. As he himself said 'I like the stripe very much because it was, in a way, a kind of a wreck of other forms of painting that I think had become untenable. So I thought that the stripe is very beautiful in that way because it has already about it a sense of failure which I am very attached to and I wanted to take something that was failed and re-use it, bring it back and put back into painting a lot of the things it had lost.' He sets up conflicts in his work with unaligned insets of opposing coloured stripes - horizontals against verticals creating a unique energy. Through his range of colours and the structure of his compositions, Scully expresses a variety of emotions through deliberately limited means.

1. Hugh Lane Memorial Lecture, 1995 (unpublished)

(Catalogue Entry [66]: A Century of Irish Painting - Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, 1997, p. 163)

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