Sean Scully | Berlin Art Scene

Galerie Max Hetzler is pleased to present Dark Yet, an exhibition of new works by Sean Scully in the gallery spaces at Bleibtreustraße 45 and Bleibtreustraße 15/16, in Berlin. This is the artist's first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Internationally recognised as one of the most important painters of his generation, Scully has formulated his evolving definition of contemporary abstraction through painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture over the past five decades. Often using simple shapes to structure his works, the artist fuses personal influences with European tradition and American abstraction, grounding vast scale and gesture with visual delicacy and a sense of vulnerability.

Comprising new paintings, drawings and aquatints, the exhibition presents works from important series including ‘Wall of Light’ which has its origins in a watercolour from the 1980s and ‘Landlines’, ongoing since the late 1990s. Also included are more recently initiated hybrids of these, such as the ‘Wall Landlines’ and ‘Nets and Cages’.

The warm hued Wall Red Blue, 2023, alongside the cooler Wall Pinks Blue, 2023, are among the latest additions to Scully’s ‘Wall of Light’ series, in which the arranged blocks of colour almost, but not quite, touch. Reminiscent of delicate cracks in a wall, this allows for glimpses of the lighter pigment beneath the paint to seep through. Two works on aluminium from the ‘Landlines’ series, both painted this year, take up the artist’s fascination for the horizon lines separating sea, sky and land. The contrasting light, weight, texture and spirit of these elements forms a fundamental part of Scully’s approach to the composition of space and colour.

Dark Yet 8.15.23, 2023, the monumental-scale work which gives the exhibition its title, belongs to the series of ‘Wall Landlines’. The work combines the horizontal bands from Scully’s earlier ‘Landlines’ works with an ‘inset’ – a painting within a painting – of the coloured blocks typical of the ‘Wall of Light’ series. Insets have appeared in many of Scully’s multi-part constructions in the past forty years: the artist uses them to evoke a double experience, almost like a mother-child association, as well as a haptic composition which sits somewhere between painting and sculpture.

Three drawings, one from each of the main series represented in the exhibition, accompany the paintings, showing the genesis of these often very large-scale works on a more intimate scale. The selection of works is completed by five aquatints, all from 2023. This printmaking technique produces lines and areas of tone which are painterly in appearance, thereby adapting the spirit and formal vocabulary of Scully’s paintings into etchings.

Scully's works draw directly from experience and nature, as much as from a sensitive receptivity for places, stories, human vulnerability, emotional nuances and vibrations of light. Questioning the prerequisites of abstraction – the aesthetics of pure form, pure surface and pure colour – the artist emphasises the intrinsic value of artistic means which lies at the very centre of his work.


Sean Scully (*1945, Dublin, Ireland) lives and works between New York, USA; Bavaria, Germany; Aix-en-Provence, France; and London, UK. Scully’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in international institutions, most recently including Passerelle Centre d’Art Contemporain, Brest (2023–2024); Collection Lambert, Avignon (2023); Thorvaldsens Museums, Copenhagen; Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art (both 2022–2023); Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna; Philadelphia Museum of Art (both 2022); Benaki Museum, Athens (2021–2022); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2021); Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest (2020–2021); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga (2019–2020); Albertina, Vienna (2019); Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2018–2019); Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2018); Museum of the Nanjing University of the Arts (2016); National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin; Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (both 2015), among many others.

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