Exhibitions
Sean Scully returns to Barcelona
Born in Dublin in 1945, Sean Scully landed in Barcelona in 1994 and soon opened a studio there, combining it with his other studios in Munich and New York. For twenty-five years, he spent long periods here and in 2019 his departure from Barcelona was surrounded by a certain uproar due to some statements he made regarding Catalan.
During these years in Barcelona, Scully experimented with techniques such as stained glass and fresco mural painting, and the result is his intervention in the Sean Scully Art Space, attached to the Montserrat Museum, in the Romanesque chapel of Santa Cecília in Montserrat in 2010-2015 and the stained glass of the Girona Cathedral in 2010-2011. In 2014, there was speculation about the donation of two hundred of his works to the city of Barcelona for the creation of a museum dedicated to his work in what was to be the Esplanade of Montjuïc, a project that did not progress.
In 2007, the Miró Foundation presented a retrospective of this artist, who has always confessed to being a fervent admirer of Mark Rothko and who also recognizes the influence of other artists such as Mondrian, Klee and Matisse, who have led him to become one of the most prominent artists of contemporary abstraction. This year, the Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera has scheduled a new retrospective exhibition of Sean Scully from March 14 to July 6, just in the year that the artist will turn 80, and has commissioned Javier Molins, an expert in the work of the Irish artist, to curate it. The proposal presented on this occasion allows us to see around sixty works structured in a chronological journey that includes some of the first pieces of the 1960s in which he started from an initial interest in figuration, an interest that Scully quickly abandoned to delve into the language of geometric abstraction first, to explore minimalist aesthetics then and return from the eighties to the geometric abstraction that has characterized him.
Small Cubed 9, Sean Scully (2021) © Sean Scully. Cortesia de l’artista
Javier Molins' exhibition approach translates into a journey that takes us to the most recent work, and the proof that he wants to especially focus on the production of these last years are the fourteen works produced recently, works in which curiously a return to figuration can be perceived. The exhibition includes some examples of the artistic production of Scully the photographer, an aspect of his creation that, if in the exhibition of 2007 at the Miró Foundation he illustrated the photographic work focused on the dry stone walls typical of the Irish rural landscape and that have inspired him so much, on this occasion he focuses on the rigorous work of observation of fragments of facades, windows, doors... of often degraded architectures, captured by Scully's camera in environments close to Barcelona and that offer complex geometries that are highly expressive and charged with a certain lyricism.
Visitors will be able to watch a documentary created by David Trueba that allows them to enter Sean Scully's studio in London, see him working on his latest works and talk about his work. It also shows the preparatory work for the exhibition at La Pedrera and also includes a conversation between David Trueba and the exhibition's curator, Javier Molins. Within what they call "expanded exhibition activities", two concerts and a visit to Santa Cecília de Montserrat are scheduled. All in all, an opportunity to fully immerse themselves in the work of what is, without a doubt, one of the great creators of geometric abstraction.
Fez, Sean Scully (2024). © Eva Herzog
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