Sea Star: Sean Scully, Exhibition, National Gallery, London: 13 April 2019 – 11 August 2019

The Irish artist Sean Scully, based in America, is one of the most important and talented living painters. His large-scale abstract works are immediately recognizable for the attention he pays to colours, which he applies creating thick and rich texture, and the way he places them on the surface with stripe of chequerboard motives. Besides this, what stands out in his work is the delicacy and the depth that he instils into his rational and geometric compositions. His poetic and contemplative style evokes horizons, landscapes and coastlines, as he explained: “I am always looking at the horizon line — at the way the end of the sea touches the beginning of the sky, the way the sky presses down on to the sea”.

This is the reason why the exhibition at the National Gallery matches his works with English romantic painter William Turner’s stunning The Evening Star (1830): a boy walks along  the seashore while the sky softly turns darker. Scully used this work as inspiration for a series of painting, in which he employs horizontal stripes, with a wise use of graduated and shifting colours, in order to recreate Turner’s melancholic landscape. Furthermore, Scully replaces the canvas with aluminium and copper, and the effect he obtains is similar to wet painting: this allows him to follow Turner’s path, which did not mean to create a finished work, but rather an attempt to study light and atmosphere changes.

A comparison between an American abstract painter and an English romantic artist could sound pretty unexpected, but it suddenly makes sense if you think that they were both moved by an intense attention to composition, shades and emotions that the artwork raises. As the curator Colin Wiggins said: “This exhibition of Scully’s paintings, pastels and prints, with their deep connections to the traditions of western painting, will allow visitors to see how the work of one of the finest painters working today emerges from the past.”