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100 Sean Scully (b.1945)
Image No. 3, “Wall of Light, Barcelona”
Watercolour, 38.5 X 57cm (15¼ x 22½”)
Signed, inscribed with title and dated 8.04.03
Kerlin Gallery label verso
Provenance: Purchased at the Special Olympics Charity Auction June 5th 2003 by current owner
(copy of cover of auction catalogue verso)
Sean Scully has always been interested in and influenced by walls. He has photographed di-
lapidated walls in urban streets from North Africa to Mexico and the stone walls of the Aran
Islands, with a keen eye for the arrangements of colours, materials and textures and the moods
they convey. His time as a construction worker in New York gave rise to huge paintings on
canvas and corten steel in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, often punctuated with openings,
resembling the vertical and horizontal solids and voids of the skyscrapers that he worked on.
By the mid-1990s a softer, more relaxed approach threw up a series of paintings bearing the
umbrella title ‘wall of light,’ usually completed by the name of a colour, place or season. The
irregularly sized verticals and horizontals of the earlier work gave way in the wall paintings,
prints and drawings to more regular ‘blocks’ of colour, that still, however, retain an organic
sense of a human presence in their fluid, uneven edges, gestural brushwork and the seepage
of underpainting that emerges around the edges of each block. In 2003 Scully was commis-
sioned to create an artwork for the entrance to the University of Limerick. His contribution,
a massive black and white wall of Chinese basalt and Portuguese limestone, was completed
and installed in August 2003.
Image No. 3, Wall of light, Barcelona
is, thus, a lyrical sketch from
the same year in which Scully built his an actual wall as an artwork, and explores the colours
that were to feature in it.
Catherine Marshall 2014
€6,000 - 10,000