Guston | Morandi | Scully (Rare edition)

Phong Bui

Hardcover | 30.7 x 1 x 26 cm | 72 pp

Mnuchin Gallery | 2022 | 9781734105971

The exhibition  Guston | Morandi | Scully traced the visual affinities between Philip Guston (1913-1980), Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), and Sean Scully (b.1945). This catalogue features an essay by artist and critic Phong Bui.

Guston, Morandi, and Scully work in series and revisit the same motifs time and again, not to resolve the mystery of painting, but rather to relish in its paradoxical nature. By engaging with geometry, grids, and stripes they demonstrate how art attempts to bring order and structure to the temporal and ever-changing experience of seeing. Here, they seek to heighten the tension between the real and the perceived, the objective and the subjective, the material and the metaphysical. United in Guston | Morandi | Scully, the artists’ personal mythologies and the sublime beauty of their compositions collectively attest to an art that lies beyond simple definition or explanation.

While all three artists have distinct methods, remarkable parallels can be observed in their organisation of pictorial space and expert understanding of the relationship between colour and form. Beyond their aesthetic compatibility, the works in  Guston / Morandi / Scully speak to a shared pathos and poetics of vision that insists art’s power lies in its enduring mystery.

Guston
The tenuous line between representation and abstraction was a chief concern for Guston as well. Over the course of the decade in which he painted abstractly, Guston blended the Impressionist’s penchant for transitory light with the Abstract Expressionist’s command of gesture, producing a dynamism akin to the late Monet. The paintings he created during this formative and experimental period incessantly shift before the eye, playing on the viewer’s conception of time and memory.

Morandi
In his nature morte, Morandi customarily situated his bottles and vases at centre, in a muted palette that both distinguished and fused them with the rectilinear spaces of the background and tabletop. The Bolognese painter’s brown, grey, and pastel objects often teeter between objective reality and a softly geometric realm of abstraction as they engage, what Scully calls, the “resistance and persistence” of sight.

Scully
In his Wall of Light series - which conceptually began with a trip to Zihuatanejo, Mexico in 1984 - Scully was similarly moved to reconcile the secular, architectural qualities of American Minimalism with a sacred, deeply personal mode of vision. This pivotal series would inspire others, like Landlines (1999–) and Robes (2001–), in which Scully achieves a romantic disquietude through colour relationships and pictorial breaks that agitate one’s perception of surface and depth. Like Morandi and Guston, Scully’s paintings and sculptures thrive on the opposing forces of truth and appearance, or permanence and transience.