Sean Scully: Passenger

The Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb presents a large retrospective of Sean Scully, Passenger, two years after it was first staged at the Museum of Fine Arts—Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest from where it later travelled to the Benaki Museum in Athens and MAMbo in Bologna. The exhibition features 64 of Scully’s artworks—canvases, works on paper, photographs, and a sculpture—an exquisite cross-section of the painter’s work over the past 50 years. The retrospective has been adapted as a result of a dialogue with the museum’s architecture, but also with its own heritage. As one of the first public art institutions in the world to call itself contemporary, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb has been, since its foundation in 1954, passionately presenting and promoting abstract art.

Sean Scully’s exhibition is a unique opportunity to see his heroic, monumental and emotionally immersive art in one of the largest art museums in Central Europe. Looking at his oeuvre from the mid-sixties to the present day, the upcoming retrospective opens up a whole series of potential narratives, concurrences and contacts that may have happened in the past, as well as the foreboding of some future, perhaps unexpected recognitions of affinities and aspirations. The retrospective opens with the Passenger as its title section which, in its nomadic features, combines the utopia of the universal language of art with the life experience of the artist, an emigrant himself. His intimate statement and personal history, abstracted into the visual language, make the exhibition an authentic testimony of an artistic journey that retains traces of doubts, uncertainties in the world of art and its complex unwritten rules.

In the large halls of the Museum, Scully’s works, ranging from intimate drawings and pastels and early figural experiments to sculptural painting surfaces, are meant to become, as the artist would say, “hard won insistent surfaces.” A walk through the exhibition reveals the starting points and inspirations for some of his seminal interventions in the medium of painting, to which he has restored dignity and innovation. Therefore, in front of his monumental compositions time stops—at least for a moment.

The stories and memories of Sean Scully—his “emotional painting” as he himself calls it—can bring us back to the essential: the contact with ourselves and with others. Just as he says that he is “using the language of the universal to make something personal” the visitors can reach the universal by starting from the personal—from humanism and empathy, the backbone of Scully’s message to the world.

On the opening day, November 16, Sean Scully will give a public lecture at 6pm in the Gorgona Hall of the Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition will be open until March 12, 2023.

The author of the retrospective is Dávid Fehér from the Museum of Fine Arts—Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest, while Jasna Jakšić, Ivana Kancir, and Ana Škegro have curated the exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb.

Main partner: Kerlin Gallery, Dublin