February 19 to May 3, 2009
MKM Museum Küppersmühle for Modern Art

Scully combines European and American pictorial traditions in his painting. His abstract paintings have a strict pictorial structure, divided into grids by stripes, bars and fields of color that contrast, interpenetrate or overlap. At the same time, the haptic quality of his paintings captivates the viewer: a hidden sensuality allows a rich world of images to shine through, which cannot be grasped but which is always present and arouses curiosity. Scully thus succeeds in capturing feelings, moods, associations and ‘images’ in abstract compositions. Titles such as “Darkness and Heat”, “Happy Days”, “Queen of the Night” or “Mirror Silver” underline the narrative moment. “The sense of the real world, the objects, the countless stories behind, under and between the geometric shape of the rectangle – that is what makes Sean Scully’s pictures so powerful,” says Susanne Kleine, the curator of the exhibition.

The exhibition title “Constantinople or Hidden Sensuality” is also set in this context, a playful title that – like Scully’s works – aims to capture impressions and evoke associations.

The artist questions the preconditions of abstraction by emphasizing the intrinsic value of artistic means – the aesthetics of pure form, pure surface, pure color – and placing them at the center of his work. Sean Scully himself says in the exhibition’s catalog interview that his paintings tell of relationships, “how bodies come together, how they touch, how they separate. How they live together, in harmony or in disharmony. The character of these bodies is constantly changing in my work, depending on the color, the opacity and transparency of the surface. All this gives them their individuality, their essence. The edge defines the relationship to the neighboring body, it places them in a context. My pictures want to tell stories that are an abstract counterpart to the ups and downs of human relationships. They want to tell how it is possible to develop as a human being in this web.”