Art Review: Sean Scully - NGI

4/5

The first painting to catch the eye in the National Gallery’s Sean Scully show is the newest, ‘Window One’, from 2014. It is divided between a blue vertical section on the left and, on the right, stripes of alternative light and dark, with an inset panel in yellow. Here we find all the usual Scully tropes, but they work, as the title suggests, like a curtain being pulled back, letting us see the sky blue opposite. Neither are the stripes bold or geometric as they are in the large scale works we are invited to contrast them with, sharing the same room: ‘Coyote’ from 2000 and ‘White Window’ from 1988.

Perhaps we are witnessing the beginnings of a freer, late style? But there is enough in these three paintings alone of progression, development and persistence with a theme to show just how much potential Sean Scully has found in his idiom of geometric shapes, stripes, panels and blocks. He has found numerous ways to animate and allude through abstraction, without reversion to figuration or landscape.