Walls of light and stones that do not divide with Scully

Sean Scully was the first Western artist to have a touring exhibition in China in 2014, with Follow the Heart: The Art of Sean Scully 1964 – 2014 stopping first in Shanghai and then Beijing. In the new exhibition at the Lisson Gallery the artist presents a series of recent works, including the paintings Wall of Light and Landline, as well as two small-scale sculptural works made with blocks of rough stone. Throughout his 50-year artistic career, Scully has practiced a form of abstraction that aims to reshape the genre. The Landlines series is the result of the laborious stratification and fusion of oil pigments in colored bands on an aluminum surface, in the manner of the striations of sedimentary rocks or horizon lines, suggesting meeting points between earth and sky or between nature and architecture. The other paintings introduce a new group of mural works that are reminiscent not only of the dry stone and timber walls typical of the countryside of Ireland and Scotland, but feature complex intertwined passages of paint that reference some of the past compositions created by the artist.