Photo: Felix Friedmann
It’s not the first time that abstract painter superstar Sean Scully shows his work in a place of worship. In Catalonia alone, where the Dublin-born, New York-based artist used to live, his stained glass windows can be found at the Baroque-style Girona Cathedral, while the chapel of the Santa Cecilia de Montserrat monastery is a permanent home to some of his signature stripe paintings.
“I love religion,” Scully tells me as we sip on strong espressos, contemplating his freshly-installed geometrical steel sculpture in the gardens of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice’s 16th-century Basilica. “All religions,” he adds. A surprising statement from the Irish-born enfant terrible of the art world, whose formative years were tainted by poverty and the oppression of the Catholic church. “I was ripped out of the convent school when I was seven, by my intemperate mother,” remembers the artist, now 73. “It’s dark, there is a certain shadow,” he continues. “But I’m very respectful of it and I love it.”
Madonna Triptych B and C, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
For Human, his new exhibition which opened this week to coincide with the Venice Biennale, Scully delves into the spiritual with a series of new sculptures, paintings, drawings and watercolour inspired by the Benedictine church, designed four centuries ago by Venetian renaissance architect Andrea Palladio. The show features Scully’s tallest sculpture to date, Opulent Ascension, rising ten metres into the air and wrapped in multicoloured felt, under the church’s central dome. But the true highlight is a triptych from his new series Madonna, marking the artist’s return to figuration for the first time in five decades.
An attempt at demonstrating the full-breadth of his painting abilities? Not quite. “I wanted to paint pictures of my son on the beach,” says the artist, showing me the original photo on his phone of his wife with their 10-year old child, which served as a model for the series of vibrant paintings, composed of contoured monochromatic blocks — not dissimilar to his early works from the 1960s. “In a way, I wanted to show how infinite painting is.”
While it may look like a U-turn, some of Scully’s most iconic abstractions have long flirted with figuration. In a previous interview, when launching an exhibition at Cuadra San Cristóbal — the Luis Barragan-designed scenic stables on the outskirt of Mexico City — the artist told me how the stacking of stones in Pre-Columbian and vernacular constructions impacted much of his Wall of Light series in the late 1990s, introducing stripes and bars, arranged vertically and horizontally. “My abstraction, as you know, has always been a little bit dirty,” he tells me, pointing to his use of thick paint and non-traditional materials like aluminium, instead of canvas. “so I was criticised for that,” he adds.
Opulent Ascension, 2019. Photo: Stefan Josef Müller, courtesy of the artist
Amid today’s growing comeback of figurative painting, Scully’s return to the genre wasn’t planned, he says. “I didn’t expect my first son to die either, which really nearly destroyed me,” remembers the artist of the tragic event in 1983, when his child from a first marriage died in a car accident. “And I think it accounted for a lot of the fierce austerity in my work,” he continues. “Some of my paintings are almost unliveable with their anger.”
Scully’s tormented past was most recently featured in the much-talked-about BBC documentary, titled Unstoppable: Sean Scully And the Art of Everything. The film, released in April, depicts a the artist’s celebrity-like, lavish lifestyle, showing him hopping on and off private jets, nonchalantly dropping by his multiple high-profile exhibition openings around the world (currently, he is the subject of a solo show at the National Gallery in London) while making countless questionable remarks. Scully, unsurprisingly, is not impressed. “It’s outrageous,” he tells me, “the guy who made it wanted to make it as sensational as possible. My life is really spent in the studio and taking my son to school. I’m one of the mummies. But it’s just not what he shows.”
For now, he is in the company of the monks, at San Giorgio Maggiore. One of them, coincidentally, turned out to be an abstract painter (“see, you never know!”). They gifted Scully with a thick, empty manuscript, tasking him to fill it. (“Being a good little slave,” the artist jokes). Has he fulfilled their request? Scully spent the past eight months filling it with his own writing, sketches and watercolours, now on display in the choir stalls behind the altar, the pages being turned daily by the monks. “I love to do things for sacred places,” he smiles.
Human, Sean Scully, is curated by Javier Molins and presented in collaboration with Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore Abbey San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice running through to 13 October 2019.