Exhibition Information

			Featuring six new paintings, Soul brings together works from Sean Scully’s celebrated Wall of Light and Landline series. The exhibition conveys the significance of place to the artist’s ongoing exploration of the stripe and block motifs that structure his distinct approach to abstraction. The paintings trace the artist’s recent return to London, which is reflected in the steel-grey undertones of their colour palettes to evoke the brooding light of the city that surrounds his studio in Kentish Town, an area of North London referenced in the title of one of the works. 

Alongside the urban environment, Scully cites ‘the muscular light of Constable’ as a key inspiration for the new paintings. Sharing the English landscapist’s preoccupation with capturing the specific atmospheric conditions of a place, he translates the high-contrast interplay of darkness and light that characterises John Constable’s pastoral scenes into his own abstract language. Subtly variegated blocks of blue, red, green and purple are layed down on copper, aluminium and linen – their tonal modulations imbuing the paintings with a luminosity resonant with the European landscape tradition that Scully draws upon. ‘I’m really in the business of unifying these two tendencies that have been at odds in our human history for a very long time,’ he has said, ‘the logical and the romantic.’