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Lot Essay
Pale Green Light (2002) is a luminous large-scale painting from Sean Scully’s celebrated ‘Wall of Light’ series: an extended study of light and form which has defined the artist’s practice for almost three decades. The earliest ‘Wall of Light’ paintings were inspired by Mexico’s sunbaked ruins and old stone walls, which Scully first visited in 1983. He identified in these ancient structures—their contours shaped and reshaped by the changing light—a compelling formal strength and emotional resonance. Over the ensuing years, across studios in London, New York, Barcelona, and rural Bavaria, Scully forged a body of work which responds palpably to the geographic and temporal specificity of its making, or to memories of other places and seasons. Each ‘Wall of Light’ painting captures the intangible, emotional quality of place. Diffusing an innate, efflorescent lustre, the present work combines tones of fawn, ochre, red, grey, and the painting’s titular green: it is a crepuscular palette, containing a quiet, late light. Across 2005-2007, Pale Green Light was included in the artist’s landmark survey Sean Scully: Wall of Light, at The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Cincinnati Art Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Pale Green Light was amongst the first paintings Scully executed in Mooseurach, the small town in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps where he acquired a studio in 2002. While in London, New York and Barcelona Scully had worked in the city, in Mooseurach he could work in direct contact with nature. Moos translates from German as ‘moss’, and it was there that Scully embarked on his first sustained study of the colour green. His studio space is bright, and expansive. In addition to skylights in the studio’s high, sloped ceilings, large nine-foot windows span either end—facades once open to the elements in the building’s earlier life as a cow shed. In one direction agricultural plains run into forest, while from the other Scully can look out on the ever-shifting light as it falls across the Alps. Pale Green Light revels in the earth-tones which abound beyond the studio walls.
Scully was not the first to identify something transcendental and profound in the light of the Alps. His works inspired by Mooseurach recall those of the German Romantic movement, during which artists such as Caspar David Friedrich turned to nature as a site of acute spiritual encounter. Pale Green Light similarly evokes the emotional condition of landscape. Surpassing genre, it functions as a kind of totemic portrait of a place. Its central, dazzling white panel suggests an aperture or window, a heavy curtain pulled back each morning to welcome light into the darkness. Light reveals form, and colour. Scully’s tendency to layer feathery strokes of light paint over dark, dark over light, reflects his admiration for the mystical abstracts of Mark Rothko, who Scully suggested ‘extends into the twentieth century the great Romantic impulse’ (S. Scully, ‘Rothko: Bodies of Light’ in Inner: The Collective Writings and Selected Interviews of Sean Scully, Berlin 2016, p. 56). With paintings such as Pale Green Light, Scully extends it into the twenty-first.
Pale Green Light was amongst the first paintings Scully executed in Mooseurach, the small town in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps where he acquired a studio in 2002. While in London, New York and Barcelona Scully had worked in the city, in Mooseurach he could work in direct contact with nature. Moos translates from German as ‘moss’, and it was there that Scully embarked on his first sustained study of the colour green. His studio space is bright, and expansive. In addition to skylights in the studio’s high, sloped ceilings, large nine-foot windows span either end—facades once open to the elements in the building’s earlier life as a cow shed. In one direction agricultural plains run into forest, while from the other Scully can look out on the ever-shifting light as it falls across the Alps. Pale Green Light revels in the earth-tones which abound beyond the studio walls.
Scully was not the first to identify something transcendental and profound in the light of the Alps. His works inspired by Mooseurach recall those of the German Romantic movement, during which artists such as Caspar David Friedrich turned to nature as a site of acute spiritual encounter. Pale Green Light similarly evokes the emotional condition of landscape. Surpassing genre, it functions as a kind of totemic portrait of a place. Its central, dazzling white panel suggests an aperture or window, a heavy curtain pulled back each morning to welcome light into the darkness. Light reveals form, and colour. Scully’s tendency to layer feathery strokes of light paint over dark, dark over light, reflects his admiration for the mystical abstracts of Mark Rothko, who Scully suggested ‘extends into the twentieth century the great Romantic impulse’ (S. Scully, ‘Rothko: Bodies of Light’ in Inner: The Collective Writings and Selected Interviews of Sean Scully, Berlin 2016, p. 56). With paintings such as Pale Green Light, Scully extends it into the twenty-first.