Sean Scully. UNINSIDEOUT

The Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery organised its highly successful retrospective of Sean Scully’s art titled Passenger in 2020, after which Scully gifted several important works to the Museum of Fine Arts: Uninsideout, a monumental painting, which he specifically reworked for the Budapest show; The 50, a series of pigment prints made from iPhone drawings; Landlines and Robes, a series of ten aquatints; and three of his most recent pencil drawings.

The Hungarian National Gallery’s current exhibition displays these donated works, offering a wide-ranging overview of Scully’s oeuvre: the painterly structure of his Uninsideout is made up of insets, overpainted surfaces as well as various motifs and textures placed side by side, above and under one another, helping visitors to make visual connections between his iPhone drawings reinterpreting motifs of his art, the soft patches of his aquatint series Landlines and Robes and the fine hatchings of his recent pencil drawings. These works being exhibited together not only highlights the significant motifs of the artist’s oeuvre but also lends emphasis to a crucial yet thus far less discussed feature of his art: the wide range of media he uses, the importance of genre crossovers, diversity in unity, and unity in diversity.

The painting Uninsideout can be understood as a metaphor of unity created through this diversity. The work, as the artist himself described it, deals with disruption, displacement, and migration. Scully put three monumental picture fields together, thus making a triptych, not only evoking a classical genre (primarily associated with altarpieces) but also a dialectic structure built on counterpoints and correspondences. Each picture panel has two “windows”, in which Scully placed insets, moving, displacing and overpainting them, thus creating a complex visual system of correspondence, non-correspondence, congruity and incongruity.

Scully began making drawings on an iPhone in April 2021. He drew the lines and patches reminiscent of his larger compositions by using his fingers, just like in his pastel pictures. The pieces of this series virtually encompass the entire arsenal of the artist’s motifs and picture types, and the prints made of these digital drawings are arranged into a large composition along a grid. Scully’s motifs gain a similar interpretation when he opts for a more traditional medium: the elusive-fluid patches and bands of colour in his aquatints are like fragile versions of his monumental oil paintings, while in his series Landlines and Robes more intimate variants of the monumental and majestic surfaces of his landlines can be observed.

In 2023, Scully started another series of fragile beauty: he reworked his earlier motifs in pencil drawings into a complex system of exquisitely fine hatchings. The works he donated to the Museum of Fine Arts include a Wall of Light (Wall of Light 11.9.23, 2023), a Wall Landline (8.26.23, 2023) and a two-part Wall (2.6.24, 2024). The compositions operate with the subtle differences of shades of grey and the rhythm of deep grey and black tones.

One of the most important artists of the contemporary art scene, Sean Scully reinvented the tradition of abstract art. “Scully’s historical importance lies in the way he has brought the great achievement of Abstract Expressionist painting into the contemporary moment”, said Arthur C. Danto, one of the most important art critics of Scully’s art. The works displayed at our exhibition also confirm the American theoretician’s statement: Scully’s art, albeit treating timeless subjects, fundamentally convey contemporary experience, through which classical traditions of painting are presented in a new light.

Sean Scully was born in 1945 in Dublin. Now he lives and works in New York, Bavaria, Aix-en-Provence and London. His works can be found in the collections of virtually all the prominent museums worldwide.

The curator of the exhibition: Dávid Fehér art historian