Wall of Light White Tundra, 2009

Sean Scully has been working since the 1970s with pure and vibrant color. His now established style makes his works—usually painted in oil on monumental panels and placed close to one another—immediately recognizable. He thinks of his process of abstraction as fitting into an earlier art historical tradition: true painting that rejects any type of serial, mechanical, alienated production. His masters belong to history: Matisse, first of all, for his emphasis on brilliant and violent colors and for his simplification of compositions; Mondrian, for whom, as for Scully, abstraction is a synthesis of reality, which is its point of departure; and finally, obviously, Rothko, in terms of the work’s monumentality, the devotion to painting, and the reflective, metaphysical atmosphere. [...]