Sean Scully: Sea Star


Colourful exhibition at the National Gallery of new work by abstract artist Sean Scully in response to time spent in the National Gallery.

Scully works in broad patterns of stripes with a limited range of colours but looks to figurative art for ideas and inspiration. In the first room which included Turner’s “Evening Star” there were works which engaged with the colours in that work and its basic structure. They made you look in more detail at the Turner itself and think of its component parts.

In the second room there were works responding to Van Gogh’s Chair which hangs upstairs in the gallery. These all had the same basic pattern but in different colour patterns. They had a very painterly quality with a looser quality than the precise geometry implies. They really showed how colours work together and react to each other. I loved a set of four pictures where each had an inserted panel from one of the other pictures giving a sense of viewing something which lay beyond the picture in the way a window might.

The last works in the show responded to his trips to China where he started to become interested in the Chinese meaning of colours and he included three pictures “Landline China 8” which he made for this exhibition and space.

Closes on 11  August 2019

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