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The Art of the Stripe

New exhibition at Hood features work of abstract painter Sean Scully

Wall of Light Summer (2005), by Sean Scully, is on view at the Hood through March 9. The painting is owned by the Hood and was purchased through the Miriam and Sidney Stoneman Acquisitions Fund. (Courtesy Hood Museum of Art)

Sean Scully is one of the most esteemed abstract painters working today, and the stripe is the key motif in his works. This winter, the Hood Museum of Art presents Sean Scully: The Art of the Stripe, an exhibition exploring the development of colorful stripes in Scully’s work over four decades.

Upcoming related events include a lecture by Brian Kennedy, director of the Hood, at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb.6, in the Loew Auditorium and an introductory tour with Kennedy on Saturday, Feb.16, at 2 p.m. For additional events, visit here or call 646-2808.

Scully is known for painting bold patterns of vertical, horizontal, and occasionally diagonal stripes in blocks of layered color as a means of exploring the nature of human relationships.  He is inspired by aspects of everyday life, from the constructed grids of skyscrapers, suburban sprawl, railway lines, motorways, and telephone lines to airplane routes, walls, and garage doors. His pursuit of multiple variations on the theme of the painted stripe, bar, and block is consistent with his assertion that “the stripe is a signifier of modernism.”

Kennedy explains that, “Scully’s painting is about relationships, those themes that each of us must deal with in life: union and disunion, harmony and disharmony, masculinity and femininity, dependence and independence. In Scully’s works, stripes and colored shapes stand in for people. But because his images are not figurative, they can seek a universal appeal, where color and form can be understood by all cultures.”

Scully was born in Dublin in 1945. His family later moved to London, where he grew up in an Irish neighborhood. He received his artistic training at Croydon College of Art and then Newcastle University, beginning his career as an artist in the late 1960s and early 1970s amid the dominance of Optical Art in Britain. He later moved to New York City, where he began painting predominantly dark, densely striped works that were both highly disciplined and contemplative. In the early 1980s, Scully imbued his work with bolder, brighter colors and established an individual style in which his brush strokes became more visible. Scully became an American citizen in 1983 and now divides his time among studios in New York, Barcelona, and Mooseurach, near Munich, Germany.

Scully’s work has been exhibited widely in Europe and the United States and is in museum collections worldwide. The recent touring exhibition in America of his Wall of Light series—which concluded in 2006 with overwhelmingly positive reviews at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York—is currently being followed by a major touring retrospective in Europe.

The exhibition was organized by the Hood Museum of Art and is funded by the Marie-Louise and Samuel R. Rosenthal Fund; the Hansen Family Fund; the Ray Winfield Smith 1918 Fund; and the Leon C. 1927, Charles L. 1955, the Andrew J. 1984 Greenebaum Fund, and Yoko Otani and Shunichi Homma ’77. A post-exhibition illustrated catalogue will be published this spring.

By SHARON REED

 

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