Sean Scully: Duane Street, 1981–1983 – The Brooklyn Rail

11 December 2024

In 1983 the English art critic John Russell, commenting on the newly-executed series of paintings by Sean Scully that are now on view at Lisson Gallery, remarked, “Whoever said that abstract painting was finished?” Adorning the walls of the gallery with their chromatic exuberance and geometric poetry, the seven dazzling and seemingly nonrepresentational paintings nonetheless invoke the vertical stance of the human body and the vertiginous towers of New York City. Executed in his second-story loft at 110 Duane Street in the early 1980s, these mesmerizing works mark Scully’s shift from Minimalist rigor to a more painterly facture, from an ethos of fabrication to one of feeling.

Titled Duane Street: 1981–1983, this museum-quality exhibition focuses on three critical years that show Scully’s aspiration to convert the geometric modularity of Minimalism into expressive geometry. Undertaken around the age of thirty-five, these grand-scale paintings mark the painter’s return to his reverence of Manet, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Monet, Matisse, Picasso, and Klee, whose works he had encountered and imbibed in the National Gallery in London during his teenage years and twenties. The “Duane Street” paintings deploy a new pictorial language that aims to reconcile the uniformity, obsessive rigor, rationality, literalism, and objectivity of American Minimalism with the exuberance, tenderness, sentiment, metaphor, and subjectivity of European expressionism.

Incorporating sculptural elements and architectonic structure, Scully’s multipanel works propose an abstraction made capable of triggering iconological and allegorical readings. As Steven Henry Madoff notes in the exhibition essay “The Torrent: Sean Scully in Duane Street, 1981–83,” Scully’s “stripes of color are understood in their trajectory from line to band to having a fleshy quality, a thickness not simply of oil and pigment but of human heft, existence, trial, and passage.” With such titles as Araby, Precious, and Adoration, Scully sets out on his journey to integrate the visual and verbal, abstraction and representation, the autotelic and autobiographical.

Read more of Raphy Sarkissian's review for the Brooklyn Rail here.