On the celebratory, exploratory materiality of Scully's abstract formalism

The oeuvre of New York-based Irish painter Sean Scully (born 1945) constitutes a continuous exploration of bands and swathes of color, captivating the viewer with hazily defined edges and brushstrokes that exalt the materiality of paint and pigment. Material World provides insight into the artist's methods, which have evolved through a sustained engagement with the art historical tradition of formalism. In an in-depth essay, Raphy Sarkissian places Scully's work in dialogue with selected works of abstract and figurative, modern and premodern painting and sculpture, as well as with aesthetic theories such as those of Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin. This dialogue continues in the interplay of the architecture of the Thorvaldsens Museum in Copenhagen at which this exhibition is displayed and the neoclassical sculptures that are presented alongside Scully's work.