Sean Scully: Big Small

For the latest exhibition in East Hampton, Lisson Gallery presents Big Small, a focused presentation that features a dialogue between two new, contrasting paintings by Sean Scully.

The exhibition highlights the most recent addition to Scully’s now iconic Landlines series. The work on view features horizontal stripes inspired by nature’s horizon line, where, as he describes, there is the “elemental coming together of land and sea, sky and land. . .endlessly beginning and ending.” Landline Black Blue (2022) marks the vista with bands of greens, yellows, pinks, blues and black. The work translates the Landlines motif from its typically large canvas onto a more intimate scale.

Across from the Landline work hangs Wall Pink (2021). Presented in contrast, the painting renders another motif from a quintessential series, Wall of Light, on an imposing scale. Featuring horizontal and vertical bands, tessellating blocks and shifting colors, the series began after the artist made the first of several influential trips to Mexico in 1983, where he used watercolor for the first time to portray the patterns of light and shadows he experienced on the stacked stones of local walls and ruins. In Wall Pink Scully piles large rectangles of color, stacked in alternating horizontal and vertical formats, and allows for traces of space where light peaks through the aggregation. The presence of light causes a lighter palette in the larger of the two works.