Sean Scully: Landline

The beautiful companion volume to the first U.S. exhibition of influential abstract artist Sean Scully's "Landline" paintings

Sean Scully's acclaimed "Landline" series will be on view at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., from September 2018 through April 2019. This book presents this remarkable group of abstract paintings, inspired by the juxtaposition of Venetian canals against surrounding brick buildings, along with a foreword by Hirshhorn director Melissa Chiu and an essay and interview with the artist by exhibition curator Stéphane Aquin. Known for combining the geometry of European concrete art with the ethereality of American abstraction, Scully is recognized as a leading artist of his generation, and his signature aesthetic overlays thick, gestural brushstrokes on grids of stripes and squares to evoke the energy and beauty of the natural world. The "Landline" paintings and their loose bands of color—sublime in their simplicity—show Scully's transition away from his earlier hard-edged minimalism to his current, more expressive style. Sean Scully: Landline offers readers the chance to experience a seminal shift in the work of one of today's most important abstract artists.