Sean Scully: A Wound in a Dance with Love

MAMbo—Museum of Modern Art of Bologna presents A Wound in a Dance with Love, a large retrospective of Sean Scully, an artist among the leading exponents of contemporary painting, which will be visible in the Sala delle Ciminiere of the museum from June 22 to October 9, 2022. 

The exhibition, curated by Lorenzo Balbi with Dublin’s Kerlin Gallery as the main partner, is based on the show Sean Scully: Passenger—A Retrospective, curated by Dávid Fehér and organized by the Museum of Fine Arts—Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest (October 14–May 30t, 2021), later hosted by the Benaki Museum in Athens.

It arrives in Bologna in a renewed version, specifically designed for the MAMbo. 26 years later, the artist is again the protagonist of a solo exhibition in Bologna: in 1996, it was the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, from whom the MAMbo is derived, which dedicated an exhibition to him in its premises of Villa delle Rose.

Both a wide knowledge of the works by old and contemporary masters and a singular sensibility in obtaining visual and emotional suggestions from actual reality equally converge into Scully’s art.

The exhibition in Bologna, with 68 exhibited works (oil paintings, acrylics, watercolors, drawings and a monumental sculpture), aims at highlighting the continuous dialogue between these two essential components of the artist’s work, by retracing over 50 years of creative experience.

From the first figurative experiments in the 1960s and the minimalist works in the ‘70s, to the current work, A Wound in a Dance with Love documents the most important developments of a practice which is always consistent with its assumptions but is also capable of changing significantly over time, in relation with emotional experiences and existential evolutions, affections and sorrows.

The exhibition is accompanied by the catalogue Sean Scully: A Wound in a Dance with Love (Edizioni MAMbo, 2022), which contains all the images of the exhibited works, as well as a selection of other works by the artist to support the essays. The volume starts with an exclusive interview with Sean Scully by Lorenzo Balbi, a sort of “small exhibition/text”, where the artist answers each question with a work, continues with the essays by Dávid Fehér, Raphy Sarkissian and Danilo Eccher and ends with an important text by Scully (2005), Giorgio Morandi: Resistance and Persistence, published for the first time in its Italian translation.

Sean Scully was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1945 and today lives and works between New York and Bavaria.