Scully: luz del sur

The painting of Sean Scully (born 1945) has a fascinating relationship to place. Born in Dublin, Scully began his career as a figurative painter in London, in the years when Freud and Bacon still dominated Britain’s art climate. A trip to Morocco converted Scully to abstraction: «It was the endless potential in the rhythm and structures of the visual world there that moved me,» he says, of its Arabic visual character. As his painting slowly gravitated towards abstraction, Scully realized that New York was the city in which he would most fruitfully develop, and moved there in 1975. He attributes his first New York series, Horizontals, to his apartment’s view of the city and the Hudson river. In spring 2012, Scully’s art is reunited with the Arabic culture that first inspired his embrace of abstraction, at the stupendous Moorish fort-palace in Granada, the Alhambra. The exhibition and this accompanying catalogue are divided into three parts: seven large paintings from the Wall of Light series; a set of 40 watercolors; and three photographic series, which intriguingly illuminate Scully’s image-making process–Aran, Santo Domingo for Nene and Alhambra, the latter of which is published here for the first time.