Sean Scully: Walls, Windows, Horizons presents Scully's recent paintings along with his photographs and works on paper—a selection of pastels, watercolors, and prints. The aim of the exhibition is two-fold: to reveal the artist's creative process rooted in the recognizable world yet expressed through abstract shapes; and to explore his interchangeable use of media and their mutual relationships. By juxtaposing Scully's painting vis-a-vis photography and other works on paper, the exhibition shows how certain motifs of concrete, visible reality— such as walls, windows, and doors Ð are transported from photographs to paintings, as well as how certain colors and hues are transported from paintings to photographs. In addition, a selection of pastels, watercolors, and prints further emphasizes Scully's preoccupation with the same motifs, yet in different media. Although the scale and materiality of the paintings are seemingly sacrificed in the works on paper, something else comes in exchange—the softness and intimacy of paper.

Scully's work derived from the traditions of European early modernism (Mondrian and Matisse), in its ideals for harmony and spirituality, and American late modernism (Pollock and Rothko), in its urge for large, open-ended compositions, expressing personal inner states. How to reconcile European order with American vigor—or more specifically, how to combine Mondrian's plastic clarity with Matisse's sensuousness, Pollock's drips, and Rothko's fluidity—has remained the basic question of Scully's art practice to which he gave slightly different answers throughout the years. In the mid- and late 1970s, his paintings reflected the influence of minimalism in their cool, reductivist look and geometric precision. During the 1980s, they gradually changed and became freer and more painterly. Bearing the marks of thick brushstrokes and broad gestures, these paintings manifested dense, yet luminous, surfaces. The most recent ones are looser, more open and fluid. In all of them, stripes retained their constant presence as both a pictorial device and as a means of re-ordering the perceptual world, as well as inner moods. Painted directly and spontaneously in numerous layers of paint, they achieve a tactility of surface similar to that of flesh and skin. It is this quality that endows them with sensual intensity and best characterizes them.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is the painting Wall of Light Brown, made in 2000. Monumental in its scale and visual impact, Wall of Light Brown radiates immense energy, but also emotional vulnerability. In a somber palette, yet imbued with luminosity, the painting mirrors melancholic moods. In expressing his thoughts on the Wall of Light series, started in 1998, Scully says: " I am trying to give light a feeling of body. . . The words light and spirit are interchangeable in my opinion. I'm trying to capture something that has a classical stillness and at the same time has enough emotion or dissonance to create an unresolved quality. . . . "

Directly related to this painting is a group of ten photographs called Art Horizon, consisting of close-up shots from the artist's series Wall of Light, of which Wall of Light Brown is a part. For this series, Scully used his own paintings as a starting point for his photographs. Rather that looking out at the visible world, like he did in Harris and Louis Shacks, he chose to zoom in on the material reality of his richly painted surfaces and transform their colors and shapes into a different abstract configuration. In Harris and Louis Shacks, a portfolio of twelve photographs, this process of transformation followed a different path, going from recognizable objects to subjective impressions of them. Although taken as snapshots of facades, windows, and doors in Scotland, these photographs are not straightforward recordings of architectural elements. By depicting fading walls, cracked surfaces, rough edges, and the deep shadows created by them, these images capture beauty in decay, and evoke the basic contradiction of nature and life: solidity and fragility, timelessness and change. In this way, as metaphors of physical and mental conditions, the photographs correspond to the abstract configuration of his paintings. While the former are tracing visible reality, the latter are capturing the memories, feelings, and thoughts connected to the experience of that reality. Nevertheless, looking at the photographs and paintings side by side only re-confirms the intricate relationship of material and immaterial, and physical and mental, aspects of life. It is precisely this continuing interchange of the recognizable and abstract worlds, the visible and the invisible, that empowers Scully's works in all media, pointing to the horizon of their merging.

Sean Scully was born in Dublin in 1945. He grew up in London and works in New York and Barcelona. He has exhibited widely in Europe and the United States: including exhibitions at the Kunstammlung Nordeim Westfalen in Dusseldoerf, Germany, (2001); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY (2000); the Milwaukee Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, and Albright-Knox Gallery (1998-99); Galeria Arte Moderna, Villa delle Rose in Bologna, and Galerie National de Jeu de Paumme in Paris (1996). His work may be found in museum collections worldwide, such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C.; Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain; Tate Gallery in London, England; The Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Ireland; and Nagoya City Art Museum, Japan.