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:...

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 dilapidated 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 commissioned 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

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