When considering a great artist, it is hard for us lay people to understand how and where they find their inspiration to create their masterpieces. Indeed, it is a source of much fascination: - how do they do what they do? But gravitate two such creative forces together and the colliding worlds are spellbinding. Take for example the tumultuous relationship of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera that is, by now, a thing of legend. Examples of artist couples are plentiful, such as Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, Marina Abramović and Ulay, Lee Miller and Man Ray, Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, to name but a few.
Though artist couples share their life, a home, children, and at times a studio, the points of contact in their art are not always obvious or visible. Though there might be a sphere of influence or common interest deploying a similar vocabulary, this might not be apparent when assessing the practices exclusively. As no man is an island, and no artist creates in a bubble, the influence an artist will have on the work of their partner is revealing as to the process of creation of both the artists. Likewise, where artist couples diverge. Viewing the art of one through the eyes of the other offers a new perspective on the practice. But as they share their lives, one must assume that the discussion over the dinner table does occasionally turn to art.
In the case of Liliane Tomasko and Sean Scully, married since 2006, if there is an influence of one artist on the other, it is not immediately apparent. Knowing the artists, art must surely dominate the conversation agenda (that is when they are not discussing their son, Oisin). They have separate studios that occupy the same building, one set in New York, one in Berlin, and another in Munich. The occasional studio crit is to be assumed. If the works do intersect, they need to be viewed side by side to discern, as we have done in this exhibition. To look for similarities, one must be prepared to embrace the differences as well. In fact, the interest lies in where two artists can co-exist and yet develop a unique, clear voice.
Both Tomasko and Scully are abstract painters, where colour, form and light dominate the pictorial plane, as visitors to the exhibition will see. What is striking to observe is how utterly different the resulting canvases are for each artist. Where Scully uses his art to explore the deeply personal, biographical narrative, Tomasko paints the universal domestic: intimate scenes from the everyone home. These diverging intentions is what aids the difference. One could argue that Scully’s influence on Tomasko is the turn from the figurative, which was the subject in her earlier works[1]. Tomasko’s influence on Scully is evident on the canvas as muse. She has become a subject for his art, turning his hand back to figuration after 50 years of abstinence.
Poetry From The Real: Liliane Tomasko
Tomasko is an artist skilled in various media. She paints, sculpts, photographs, and draws. Her process in creating her paintings uses all of the above techniques. Her work is a dichotomy. What seems spontaneous, with bursts of form and flowing colour, is carefully considered and methodical. Rehearsing the same process for each of her canvases, she is precise in her approach.
Tomasko was born in Zurich in 1967. Her parents, originally from Hungary, had been living in Switzerland since 1956. She had a darkroom at home where she exercised her photography skills. At the age of 17 she got her first job working in an art gallery, Jamileh Weber, though opted to study Business Administration for her first degree. Her interest in photography, however, never waned and she completed a course at Camberwell College, which was what originally brought her to London. In 1992, she completed a further degree in Sculpture followed by a master’s degree in Sculpture from the Royal Academy of Arts. Her early works post-graduation focused on sculptures made from found furniture and objects reassembled.
It was in this time, in 1998, that her relationship with Sean Scully started and an interest in two-dimensional work became apparent. Moving to New York, Tomasko began painting in earnest. Her training as a photographer and sculptor greatly informed her process to which she remains true to this day. Tomasko begins with a Polaroid photograph of an intimate domestic scene. A crumpled bedspread, a pile of towels, a disregarded nightgown, a creased pillow. The next step is to translate this photograph into a line drawing, picking out the crude shapes and contours thus flattening the image to a mass of quivering elements on the page. She will then paint from the drawing onto the canvas. As with Chinese whispers, a new image emerges like an alternate reality, merely a shadow of the original. Over the years, her technique developed so that the objects are less recognisable, more abstract and unravelled. Looking at her more recent works, such as Hung out to Dry, 2016, the scrutiny of the detail is so intense that the work resembles a microscopic enlargement. Like snapping synapsis, the lines are like electrical signals crackling along a wire.
It is this energy that Tomasko brings to the canvas that reveals a different side to the domestic sphere. No longer comforting and silent, it is full of tension and drama. As one penetrates deeper into the scene the experience intensifies. The subdued and contained suddenly bursts out rebelliously, revealing another dichotomy in her work: the domestic sphere is not calm but stormy. After all, the bed is where we rest but also where we are sick, where we make love, and where we die.
On the ground floor of the exhibition, the works on display have a more webbed motif. For example, as with Falling Asleep at The Gate, 2016, where the black lines emerging from behind the paint are finer, or Reasonable Madness, 2015, where the colour is treated so that the connecting shapes propose a solid form behind a net. Moving upstairs to her most recent works, one can discern further shift. The lines pulled across the canvas are thicker and bolder. As with AIR, 2018, the direction is more controlled. Tomasko even removes all colour with Gray Matter I, 2019, exploring yet a further dimension. The paintings are darker with a psychological intensity. As the title suggests in Dreaming, 2018, digging further into the thick molasses of the subconscious.
The exhibition starts with a video work titled Domestic Hymn, 2015. Revealing a more playful side to her personality, this stop frame animation is of clothes and blankets arranging themselves into a folded pile of fabrics. It is with this work that we can appreciate the sculptural aspect of Tomasko’s work. As the video suggests, the domestic sense Tomasko photographs are in fact staged. The fabrics are carefully draped, and sheets purposefully tossed, again revealing a controlled nature to Tomasko’s approach. Everything is adjusted for artistic reasons, like Alexander Gardner’s photographs of the American Civil War. It might seem accidental, but very little has been left to chance.
The film also boasts Tomasko’s skills as a sculptor, augmenting fabrics to the desired shapes before photographing and painting them on her canvas. Though a very different medium, when observing the image of the stacked fabrics, the image is reminiscent of Scully’s sculptures, three of which can be seen in the exhibition.
Transforming The Real: Sean Scully
Sean Scully’s return to sculpture has been a relatively recent development in his practice. He has created sculptural pieces in the past, notably in the 1980s, but his recent works feel like a new development. They are, as he explains, a three-dimensional iteration of what it is he does on the two-dimensional paintings. “If Mickey Mouse was me, and Mickey Mouse wanted to make one of my sculptures, it would be a beautiful Walt Disney cartoon because all the blocks would come off my painting and off the wall and start reassembling themselves three-dimensionally in the middle of the room. And this is how I think. It was easy for me to make sculpture. I couldn't get it wrong.”[2]
In his abstract canvases, unlike Tomasko who, as I have explained earlier deals with the universal domestic, Scully explores the emotions derived from a deeply biographical position. To engage with Scully’s paintings is to enter the world of another human being, to witness his joy, and his pain. If we cannot sympathise, we can empathise, as one does when reading a book.
The earliest canvas selected for this exhibition of Sean Scully dates back to 2008 though the majority are of his most recent productions. From the canvas-based work, Black Square Night, 2020, is the newest. It is a painting such of his Landline series, with a black square inserted in its centre. Scully often uses black in his paintings, as he explains, “when I don’t know what colour to put down, I put down black. Black is a force.”[3]This work was painted during the year of the Covid-19 pandemic and the anxiety of the period of confinement is reflected in the piece. It is a deeply moving and sombre work to witness. It is interrupted with the black, much as our lives were interrupted by the virus.
“The window that I put into my work went black. That’s the first time I’ve done that, and it’s the first time I’ve been able to… In the late ’80s, I started to put a lot of windows into the paintings, and they were real windows. I did try to leave some one color, and I don’t know what it was, whether it was my emotion, my insecurity, my need to do something else first, or the general climate swirling around me, but I was unable to make [a solid color insert] happen. You know, my work is always based on metaphor, so the meaning of [black] didn’t touch me as true at that time. It was only now when I returned to this window idea that I could see them as black, because of what’s in the air.”[4]
There is another renown ‘black square’ in art history. One of the seminal works of Modern art; that of Kazimir Malevich. Malevich uses the black square as a break from representational painting and is the evolutionary gap before abstract painting. Malevich wrote “Up until now there were no attempts at painting as such, without any attribute of real life… Painting was the aesthetic side of a thing, but never was original and an end in itself.”[5] Scully takes this motif further yet, painting the black square alongside real-life attributes.
In addition to being one of the most important abstract painters to emerge in the 21st century, Scully has an uncommon ability to express himself in writing. His texts are dotted around the exhibition to illustrate and explain the paintings on the walls.
Born in Ireland in 1945 to a Traveller family, Scully fought his way through an underprivileged childhood. He was aware from a young age that he was destined to be an artist and put himself through evening art school at Central School of Art. Working odd jobs in London (mainly manual labour) he spent his free time visiting the cities many art galleries, notably Tate and the National Gallery where he was inspired by Vincent Van Gogh, amongst others. In his travels, Scully also spent much time in Morocco, a place that he cites as being of much significance in his development as an artist “I visited the village of Tin Mal. I took a lot of photos of the mosque there which, although it was being restored, was open to the public. The whole place - the mosque, the people, plus the surrounding landscape - all had a significant effect for me".
This love of geometric forms was further enforced when he arrived at New York and was deeply moved by the energy of the industrial construction axes across the city. The sum of these two localities informed his choice to explore vertical and horizontal stripes as a vehicle to convey his message of abstract emotion rooted in biography. Though it is a seemingly simple idea, the result is complex and remarkable varied.
In the 1970s, Scully moved to New York having been awarded a two-year Harkness Fellowship. In this time, Scully earned himself the reputation of being a rebel artist. He started exploring a more abstract, emotional language, while his contemporaries were occupied with the Minimalist movement. Indeed, Scully was a successful member of the Minimalist movement. His turn from Minimalism was at the time much criticised.
Minimalism was pitched as a reaction against Abstract Expressionism. Much like Malevich’s Black Square, it was a movement that stripped away all reference and is the most extreme point of abstraction, representing nothing from reality, standing for itself alone. Even titles were removed from the artworks which were all labelled ‘untitled’. It was the height of radical artistic production. The challenge Scully encountered with the movement was that it presented too many boundaries. He found it to be a dead end to art. As he explains, “Abstraction, during its brief history, has moved ever closer to an idea of perfection through extreme resolution. But the moment this resolution was achieved it was simultaneously burdened by closure. This is the main problem, the simple reason it has fallen from grace. And Minimalism is disproportionately to blame for this.”[6]
When he decided to turn from Minimalism and take abstraction into a new direction, he created a new movement for art, that of Emotional Abstraction, one that reconnects with human experience, steeped in joy, resentment, anguish, and ache. Scully even reintroduced titles to his art that hint at the subject.
And so, when looking at his works, for example Wall of Light Pale Sky, 2011, the viewer is allowed to discern a narrative in the work, to explore the emotions in the piece, and be guided by the title. In this work, the viewer is reminded of a dawn. A solitary moment when first pale light starts to push through the darkness that still lingers on the edges of the canvas. Or Landline Green Sea, 2014, evokes a sea of varying depths after a storm, calling on the sublime, there is fear in the work in which one could drown.
His language is versatile and, as visitors at the exhibition will see, translates to various medium, successfully executed in oil, but also pastels, watercolour, stone, glass and steel, each material offering its own texture and nuance.
The show ends with yet another surprising break for Scully with Eleuthera, 2016 and Eleuthera, 2017. Here we see a return to figuration in Scully’s work. As previously stated, the artist has come full circle. Rather than abstracting this chapter of his life, this story is clearly depicted, showing his son Oisin, and Liliane, his wife, her influence being the subject of his work.
Seen side by side, this exhibition looks to illustrate how two abstract painters, living in close quarters, sharing life and experiences, can both influence each other and remain entirely separate. In their art the possibilities are limitless.
[1] These works are not on display in the show.
[2] Binkin, Maya. Sean Scully: Sculpture to Last for a Thousand Years, Artuk.org, posted 12 March 2020.
[3] Molins, Javier. Scully+Tomasko, exhibition catalogue, Fundación Bancaja, 2016 – 2017, p. 78.
[4] Heinrich, Will. Sean Scully Closes His Windows, The New York Times, posted 9 April 2020.
[5] Kazimir Malevich, 1915 handout accompanying Last Exhibition of Futurist Painting 0.10.
[6] Grovier, Kelly. Inner. The Collected Writings and Selected Interviews of Sean Scully. Hatje Cantz, 2016, p. 50.