Sean Scully - Enter Six (Image II)
American, born in Ireland, b.1945
Enter Six (Image II), 1998
Etching, aquatint, spitbite and sugarlift, 30 x 22.5 inches
Edition 29/ 40
Alexander & Bonin Publishing
00.005b

Gift of Thomas S. Porter (MBA '67)

Working as a professional painter since the mid-1970s, Scully established himself early in the next decade as a major contemporary artist. It was at this time that he began to publish print editions with important American workshops. Despite the ascendancy of installation and digital art, Scully's suggestive and atmospheric forms argue forcibly for the continuing vitality of abstract painting.

Scully's portfolio of etchings, Enter Six, presents the artist's characteristic interest in stacked and overlapping blocks and bars of color. Drawn to etching and aquatint processes that allow for subtle tonal transitions and watercolor effects, Scully achieves soft, luminous grounds over which more opaque grids are imposed. Variations in color and in the number and width of shapes lead to subtle shifts in mood. His striped abstractions evoke dark rooms, dark spaces and primal forms. In his recurring fascination with mysterious contrasts of light and dark, Scully plays upon traditional associations of radiance and poetically visualizes, in his own words, "Light = Hope = Faith."