© Sean Scully
On view
Loevner Artwalk
Labna,
2006
Despite the seeming economy of his aesthetic choices, Scully positions his work as being at war with Minimalism, committed instead to bringing human elements back into painting, what he termed “what’s interesting, engaging, perverse, and beautiful about human nature.” The work’s invocation of the spiritual and poetic in its expressive textures and colors has multiple sources. An early job loading trucks with flattened boxes at a cardboard factory led to a lifelong interest in stacking. The drystone walls of Scully’s native Ireland and later travels to Morocco and Mexico—Labna is named for an ancient Maya settlement on Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula—suggested new ways of injecting spiritual concerns into abstract painting, seeing in these sources “repetitive ritualized movements.” Scully likened the result, in its richly painted rhythm of alternating vertical and horizontal blocks, to a “nocturnal Zen world” of meditation.
James Christen Steward, Nancy A. Nasher–David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, Director, Princeton University Art Museum
More Context
Handbook Entry
Sean Scully’s paintings are infused with a sense of poetry, spirituality, and majesty. His means are relatively economical — a somber palette and an austere formal vocabulary inspired, in part, by visits to North Africa — but from them he is able to extract both variation and depth of feeling. The alternating vertical and horizontal blocks that comprise <em>Labna</em> generate a hypnotic rhythm that Scully, speaking of a similar work, likened to a "nocturnal Zen world" of meditation and "repetitive ritualized movements." "Labna" was the name of an ancient Maya settlement on the Yucatán peninsula whose ceremonial architecture is evoked in the eponymous painting.
Information
2006
