Sean Scully: Change and Horizontals (Drawing Papers)

Sean Scully’s move from London to New York City in 1975 marked a stylistic breakthrough to a period in which he became more engaged with the textures of the metropolis that surrounded him. Culled from two distinct series, the Change and Horizontals drawings--executed in London and New York respectively--highlight the primacy of color and form in Scully’s abstractions. Impressions of each city are fundamental to these drawings, as location plays a key role in the artist’s oeuvre; as the artist stated in 2006, “People tend to think of abstraction as abstract. But nothing is abstract: it’s a self-portrait. A portrait of one’s condition.” This publication accompanies an exhibition organized by The Drawing Center. The works, reproduced as full-color plates, are comprised of acrylic, ink, graphite and masking-tape drawings from 1974–75, as well as two large-scale paintings from the same period and the artist’s notebooks.