Lisson Gallery presents Sean Scully in LA Deep. An opening art party was held on September 22, 2023. However, the solo exhibition runs through November 4, 2023.
Lisson Gallery Sean Scully
Scully returns to Los Angeles almost 50 years after making his US debut there, unveiling a selection of new and older works at Lisson’s recently-launched LA space. The gallery celebrates the development of his practice over five decades. This era-spanning exhibition draws formal and conceptual resonances between Scully’s earliest grid paintings, which were first shown in Santa Monica in 1975, all the way forward to equally innovative, large-scale works from 2023.
Supergrid Series
Scully’s so-called Supergrid series of works began while still a student, in London and Newcastle in the 1960s. The series progressed towards a sophisticated language of overlapping, interwoven stripes painted between taped boundaries. He was influenced by his tutor Ian Stephenson, whose dripped and dotted paintings featured in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Swinging Sixties film Blow Up. Scully began working on his own complex, focus-pulling compositions. These too refused to fully reveal themselves at first sight, allowing only glimpses into its structure and necessitating prolonged viewing times. In epic feats of labor and painterly engineering, Scully built up dozens of horizontal and vertical lines. Thus intensifying this grid with multiplying layers of crisscrossing diagonals. Furthermore, he created expansive panels that exceeded even his tall frame and bodily span.
In the intervening years between these disparate bodies of gridded paintings, Scully himself moved to the US full time in 1975. He settled in New York after a long cross-country road trip. The artists has returned many times since to show in California. Scully brings his own written recollections and photographs of these formative visits included in an accompanying catalogue to this exhibition, also featuring texts by art critics Peter Frank and Donald Kuspit.
On View: September 23, 2023 – November 4, 2023
What: LA Deep, Sean Scully
Where: Lisson Gallery, 1037 N. Sycamore Avenue, Los Angeles
When: Running through November 4, 2023
Website: https://www.lissongallery.com
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