KEY Magazine Fort Worth

MODERN ART MUSEUM OF FORT WORTH
PRESENTS SEAN SCULLY: WALL OF LIGHT

"Sean Scully: Wall of Light" will be on view at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth through May 28, 2006.

"Wall of Light" consists of oils, watercolors, pastels, and aquatints. In 1983 and 1984, on his trips to the Yucatán, Scully became fascinated with how the surfaces of Mayan stone walls, animated by light, seemed to reflect the passage of time. It was Scully's memory of how light played on the ancient walls in Mexico—so different from the fleeting, brooding light he grew up with in London—that most affected this new series. In 1998, after additional trips to Mexico and almost twenty years after his initial trip, he revisited his original watercolors and began the current series, which now consists of more than two hundred works, including the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth's Wall of Light Desert Night of 1999.

Scully explains his artistic approach as "Old and new at the same time, certainty and uncertainty...art produced by conditions." Michael Auping, the Modern Art Museum's chief curator, says, "The ‘Wall of Light' paintings are a remarkable group of works. Seen together, they do not appear ‘abstract' in the normal sense of the term, but are very literal and visceral presences in which the artist has achieved a precise balance between emotion, color, weight, light, and touch. These are paintings that can be looked into and at for a long time."

Scully was born in postwar Dublin and raised in a working-class district of South London. At age fifteen, he apprenticed as a typesetter at a commercial print shop and has retained a love of printmaking ever since. When he reached his twentieth year, Scully decided to commit to his art and enrolled at Croydon College of Art, later studying at Newcastle University. During his studies, he discovered the paintings of Mark Rothko and Bridget Riley and began working in abstraction.

Scully came to the United States in 1972 to pursue a yearlong graduate fellowship at Harvard. In the early 1980s, he began to alter this approach, reintroducing color, space, and brushstroke into his work and experimenting with composition and structure. By the mid-1980s, Scully had become internationally recognized for his work and was included in New York's Museum of Modern Art's "An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture." In the late 1980s, Scully also had a solo exhibition in Europe, which originated at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, and traveled to Madrid and Munich. A 160-page hardcover Sean Scully: Wall of Light, catalog, co-published by The Phillips Collection and Rizzoli International Publications, is available in The Modern Shop or online at www.themodern.org.

The exhibition is organized by The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC and made possible by the global financial services firm UBS.

Another new exhibition is the Modern's presentation "Nicholas Nixon: The Brown Sisters," on view through April 30, 2006. The thirty-one black-and-white photographs of the artist's wife and her three sisters offers a compelling look at both portraiture and familial relationships.

Michael Auping, Chief Curator at the Modern, comments, "A factual description of The Brown Sisters sounds simple enough: black-and-white photographs of four sisters taken over a period of time. However, when you see these images together as a group, they have a remarkable impact. Over a period of thirty years, Nixon has transformed the idea of the dreaded family photo into something powerfully intimate, even epic. You don't need a lot of art jargon to explain what these works are about. They are about lives lived, and the two things that most of us obsess about: relationships and time."

Nixon's series was taken with an 8x10 view camera. From the first photograph in 1975 to the last one taken in 2005, the sisters, Heather, Mimi, Bebe, and Laurie, always appear in the same order--left to right. The poses and expressions of the sisters tell the story of the thirty-one years in their lives. While some events are obvious, such as pregnancy, others are less apparent and are, therefore, open to the interpretation of the viewer.

The challenge of being a portrait photographer is to transcend the simple act of taking a picture to capture the subject's essence. It is obvious that Nixon accomplished that with the four sisters over the period of thirty-one years.

Museum gallery hours are Tues.-Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. and Sun. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. General admission is $8 for 13+, $4 for Seniors and students with an ID. Free for children 12 and under. 3200 Darnell Street, 817-738-9215, www.themodern.org.

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