'Sean Scully: Uninsideout' at the Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest, HU

20 May 2024

From 17 May – 1 September 2024, works by Sean Scully will be on show at the Hungarian National Gallery. The Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery organised an exhibition from the oeuvre of Scully in 2020, after which the artist donated significant works to the Museum of Fine Arts: these are now displayed at the Hungarian National Gallery.

The Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery organised its highly successful retrospective of Sean Scully’s art titled Passenger in 2020, after which Scully gifted several important works to the Museum of Fine Arts: Uninsideout, a monumental painting, which he specifically reworked for the Budapest show; The 50, a series of pigment prints made from iPhone drawings; Landlines and Robes, a series of ten aquatints; and three of his most recent pencil drawings.

The Hungarian National Gallery’s current exhibition displays these donated works, offering a wide-ranging overview of Scully’s oeuvre: the painterly structure of his Uninsideout is made up of insets, overpainted surfaces as well as various motifs and textures placed side by side, above and under one another, helping visitors to make visual connections between his iPhone drawings reinterpreting motifs of his art, the soft patches of his aquatint series Landlines and Robes and the fine hatchings of his recent pencil drawings. These works being exhibited together not only highlights the significant motifs of the artist’s oeuvre but also lends emphasis to a crucial yet thus far less discussed feature of his art: the wide range of media he uses, the importance of genre crossovers, diversity in unity, and unity in diversity.

The painting Uninsideout can be understood as a metaphor of unity created through this diversity. The work, as the artist himself described it, deals with disruption, displacement, and migration. Scully put three monumental picture fields together, thus making a triptych, not only evoking a classical genre (primarily associated with altarpieces) but also a dialectic structure built on counterpoints and correspondences. Each picture panel has two “windows”, in which Scully placed insets, moving, displacing and overpainting them, thus creating a complex visual system of correspondence, non-correspondence, congruity and incongruity.

Running from 17 May – 1 September 2024.

Sean Scully, Uninsideout detail, 2018-2020, Oil, acrylic and oil pastel on aluminum,118 x 225 in (299.7 x 571.5 cm) Photographed by Gunter Lepkowski. © Sean Scully.

Find out further information via the Hungarian National Gallery.