Sean Scully

Galerie Lelong, New York 

Private Collection, Texas

Private Collection, New York

Sale: Sotheby's, London, Contemporary Art Evening Sale, 15 February 2011, Lot 60

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colour in the printed catalogue is fairly accurate although the red and yellow tones are deeper in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals a few minute losses that have been consolidated and fluoresce darker under ultra-violet light to the lower left and upper centre edges. Further inspection reveals hairline cracks in places along the extreme edges, which have also been consolidated and fluoresce darker.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion. Illustrations in the catalogue may not be actual size. Prospective purchasers are reminded that, unless the catalogue description specifically states that a stone is natural, we have assumed that some form of treatment may have been used and that such treatment may not be permanent. Our presale estimates reflect this assumption.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

An ode to the long creeping shadows of the rising sun, Sean Scully’s Enter Yellow is an inimitable example of the artist’s celebrated sensorial abstraction. Executed in 1999, the year after the artist first embarked upon his career defining Wall of Light series, Enter Yellow resonates with the excitement surrounding the artist at this pivotal moment in his career. Comprised of lavishly painted vertical and horizontal bricks of varying dimensions, the present work is both formally and theoretically in concert with this iconic series of works. Here two golden yellow blocks enter the painting from the left hand side, shedding light on the crepuscular darkness of the inky blue and jet black bricks on the right, evoking the warmth and soft light of the rising sun. This is, the artist notes, “something I do a lot. I see something and I have a feeling of something – it might be the light, or the heat, they are very specific in that sense – and I unload the painting…" (Sean Scully quoted in: Florence Ingleby, Sean Scully Restistance and Persistance: Selected Writings, London 2006, p. 179). Perfectly encapsulating Scully’s iconic aesthetic language, the compositional economy of Enter Yellow is strikingly powerful, with a single set of forms and sumptuous hues working in binaries to create a simply stunning architecture.

It was a formative trip that Scully made to Mexico in the early 1980s that would come to shape his entire artistic output. There, the artist became preoccupied by the monumental stacked stones of the ancient Mayan walls at Yucatan and the way in which the bright light danced off them, bringing them to life. For Scully, it seemed to perfectly capture the passing of time: "these places in the Yucatan were cities, now you see a wall, what remains, a wall transformed by light, the walls change colour, from pink to blue to red. I would get up early, the shadows completely transform the ruined architecture, they make it seem hopeful one moment, tragic another" (Sean Scully quoted in: David Carrier, Sean Scully, London 2004, p. 211). In Enter Yellow this interaction between light and dark is masterfully conveyed through Scully’s extraordinary facture. The whole canvas is transformed by the ripples of golden light that emanate from the left hand side, animating its surface just as the warm rays of sunshine did almost twenty years earlier in Yucatan. Recalling the extent this influence had on his art, Scully remarked: “I can’t exactly explain it, but seeing the Mexican ruins, the stacking of the stones, and the way light hit those facades, had something to do with it, maybe everything to do with it” (Sean Scully quoted in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sean Scully: Wall of Light, 2005, p. 24).

To create his mesmeric, fragmented compositions, like Enter Yellow, Scully uses a five inch brush to traverse each brick with multiple layers of glutinous varnish-thickened oil paint, emphasising the presence of the artist’s hand. The lavish strata in Enter Yellow present an elegant and enveloping structure: the gold blocks have a fleeting, ethereal presence whilst the inky blacks that are tempered by great pools of rich dark blue anchor the work and create void-like absences. Within his succulently coloured paintings, the key hue, which is so magisterially depicted in the present work, is black, the only colour that the artist ever uses in its pure state. This fascination with black stems from the artist’s admiration of the rich black tones in the paintings of seventeenth-century Spanish artists such as Velázquez and Goya and is represented here in two masonry-like slabs. Not only looking back, Scully also acknowledges the influence of Modern masters on his work stating that: “if you have Matisse, Mondrian, Rothko, then you’ve got my work” (op. cit., London 2004, p. 61). Much more than just a conflation of art historical references, Enter Yellow is a pioneering work, executed in a moment when Scully was pushing the boundaries of sensorial abstraction to an entirely new, ground-breaking limit.