Horizon is a beautifully designed large-format, hardcover/folio publication which presents new paintings from Sean Scully’s Landline series.

The artist’s unique language of abstraction, which applies North American-influenced expression through the ocular of European art history. A richness of colour and pared down forms is fused with a gestural yet emotional abstraction.

The catalyst in charging Scully’s formal rigour with emotional content is the application of liberated brushwork, which injects meaning into even the liminal spaces where forms and colours meet. As the artist states, ‘at some time in the evolution of the surface, something more emotional has to happen.’

Informed by perpetual travel, and a personal connection to landscape and nature, the Landline paintings address a preoccupation with the horizon, which has been reduced to its purest form without the support or resistance of the vertical. By removing one axis, the other loses its reference point and becomes capable of suggesting a sense of infinity across the unilateral plane.

‘I was always looking at the horizon line, at the way the end of the sea touches the beginning of the sky, the way the sky presses down on to the sea, and the way that line (that relationship) is painted… I try to paint this, this sense of the elemental coming together side by side, stacked in horizon lines endlessly beginning and ending…’  –  Sean Scully

Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Sean Scully: Horizon at Timothy Taylor, London, 2 November – 17 December 2016.