If abstract art ever really catches on in China – and it has been rapidly gaining appeal in the past few years – Sean Scully is partly to thank.
One of the most influential names in China, Scully was the first Western artist to have a major retrospective in Shanghai, held last year. His conceptual works are highly coveted among Chinese collectors, and serve as inspiration for rising students in the field.
On September 6, Scully’s exhibition, Resistance and Persistence, opens at the Guangdong Museum of Art, where it will run until October 9. The show follows a series of successful exhibitions in Shanghai, Beijing and Nanjing earlier this year.
Installation view of ‘Sean Scully: Circa 70’ featuring Sean Scully, “Blaze” (1971) (courtesy Cheim & Read, New York)
Bold, uncensored and a bit jarring (both in person and on the canvas), Scully embodies the complicated past that pushed him, headfirst, into the world of art.
Born into an extremely poor family in Dublin in 1945 and raised in South London, he admits to having a strained relationship with his parents. When he finally saved enough to pay his own way through the Croydon College of Art, Scully worked with “such intensity it scared the other students,” as he described to Vice in an interview.
After earning a graduate fellowship at Harvard in the early 70s, he ventured to New York and was later nominated for the Turner Prize – a prestigious annual award given to a British visual artist under the age of 50 – in 1989 and 1993. It was also in New York that he taught Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei.
Composed of broad, textured panels layered thick with paint, Scully’s works often involve architectural constructions of bounding walls and trademark stripes. He has said his style represents the way Ireland has moved towards a more checkered society.
China Piled Up, 2014: a monumental sculpture that consists of box-like open steel frames stacked upon one another.
Scully’s most recent exhibition at the Guangdong Museum of Art presents more than 60 works, including a range of paintings and his massive sculpture, China Piled Up.
Offering a raw, authentic and emotionally charged window into abstract art, Scully’s candidness validates the genre, giving viewers an opportunity to find meaning between the lines.
READ MORE: Shenzhen's Quest for Artistic Identity
[Cover image via joesartoftheday.blogspot.com]
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