(born Dublin in 1945)
“Lucia”, 1992–1996, titled on the reverse, oil on linen, 254 x 223.5 cm, (PP)

Provenance:
Galerie Lelong, Paris
Acquired there in 1998 by the current owner –
Austrian Collection

Exhibited:
Paris, Sean Scully, Recent Paintings, Galerie Lelong, 20 March - 24 May 1997, exhibition catalogue “Repères n°91”, page 19 with ill.;
Zürich, Sean Scully, Paintings and Works on Paper, Galerie Jamileh Weber, 22 November 1997 – 28 February 1998;
Vienna, Sean Scully, BAWAG Foundation, 4 July - 29 August 1998, exhibition catalogue page 9 with ill. (Curators: Helmut Friedl, Christine Kintisch, Hans-Michael Herzog);
Bern, Sean Scully. Grey Wolf – Retrospektive, Kunstmuseum Bern, 9 March - 26 June 2012 (label on the reverse)/ Linz, Sean Scully. Retrospektive, Lentos Kunstmuseum, 12 July - 14 October 2012, exhibition catalogue, page 98 with ill.

Literature:
David Carrier, Sean Scully, Thames & Hudson, 2004, page 183 with ill.;
Sean Scully, Resistance and Persistence: Selected Writings, ed. Florence Ingleby, Merrell London/New York, 2006, page 62 with ill.

“»Lucia« is the name…
… of a painting by Caravaggio. This is a painting of pure revenge. I was in Sicily trying to see Caravaggio’s painting in Santa Lucia. And typically in Sicily they open the museum when they feel like it. Since I never got to see the painting, I painted my own.”
(Sean Scully, Kunstmuseum Bern/Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, exhibition catalogue p. 98)

Scully’s works are characterized by his intensive work with paint and paint brush. The artist uses a house painting brush and leaves visible traces of it. He applies the painting multiple layers wet on wet so that various colors fuse into one another. The generous amount of oil mixed into the painting as binder makes the surface shine. The choice of colors is thought over, and the turned relationships within the image is continually readjusted throughout the process of painting a picture. This continues until the work is completed.

The Irish born artist lives and works in Barcelona, New York and Munich.
Sean Scully’s stile is influenced by American Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism. He works with a reduced form of language and color palette (…)
Within his paintings there is a great personal strength and an emotional intensity. Aspects that also guide the artist during the create of process.
Sean Scully creates architecture from his personal experiences. He fuses together things that he sees and feels thus piecing together a new reality.
(Sean Scully, Kunstmuseum Bern, 2007, YouTube.com)

It was during a visit to Morocco that Scully became fascinated by the motifs that would eventually turn into his iconic blocks of color. Captivated by the geometric patterns of the local, hand-dyed woolen cloth and the faded and fragmented facades of the buildings, he began to develop his own unique language.

The lavish patchwork of painterly brushstrokes of Lucia points Scully’s own unique approach to Abstraction and Minimalism. The combination of delicate light based and subtly different whites all composed in coalescing blocks of color transmits a spiritual quality. This feeling is reinforced by the rich painterly nature of the work.

“Scully was inspired by Rothko‘s atmospheric use of layered color, the way the separations between his blocks of color revealed the layer underneath. Scully injected Piet Mondrian‘s strict grid like architecture into Rothko, animating his quiet mediations and giving early body and weight to his vaporous clouds of color”.
(S.B. Phillips, ‚Becoming Sean Scully, exh. cat., Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 2005, p. 19).