Airport, please! A first, the LRFA blog heads to Salzburg for an exhibit of Sean Scully at the illustrious Thaddeus Ropal gallery

by leslierankowfinearts

Gallery Thaddeus Ropac
Salzburg, Austria

SALZBURG

The Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is an art gallery in the Villa Kast right at the Mirabell Gardens with side-branches in the city centre of Paris (France) and a newly developing exhibition venue at the outskirts of Salzburg. Thaddaeus Ropac himself, born 1960 in Klagenfurt (Carinthia), is a highly regarded member of Salzburg′s art benefactor scene. He lives in Schloss Emslieb at the Hellbrunner Allee and is one of only a handful of significant gallerists that Austria has to offer – probably the most important one.

The Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac can be tracked back to small galleries that Ropac opened in Lienz (Eastern Tyrol) and later in Salzburg′s Old Town in the early 1980ies, after giving up his original idea to become an artist himself. From the beginning, his gallery was dedicated to highly regarded contemporary art.

Which is unusual for Salzburg, a city with an “art scene” that normally concentrates on pimping out tacky Mozart-paintings and water colours with Old Town scenes to tourists. In an interview with the Austrian Press Agency APA, Ropac admitted that his beginnings at the Kaigasse were humble and shocked artists like Andy Warhol or Joseph Beuys when they came to visit him.

http://visit-Salzburg.net

The “Good Gallery” in Salzburg

Over the course of the years, the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac became synonymous with all the good things that create a presence in  the art market: A good sense for serious works, access to important people on the art market and – maybe most importantly – for offering manifold opportunities for lucrative investments.

Today, Thaddaeus Ropac is highly regarded in Salzburg, not only because his exhibitions add invaluable elements of contemporary art to Salzburg, but also because of his generous donations for the Museum der Moderne (Museum of Modern Art) and other art-related projects. A collection given to the Museum in 2009 was almost a million Euros worth – equalling the museum′s budgets for new acquisitions of about ten years.

Ropac is involved with the Salzburg Association′s art project as well as with the Salzburg Festival and has close personal and professional links to Anselm Kiefer. The Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac′s headquarter at the Villa Kast has the best exhibitions during the summer season, when the Salzburg Festival brings rich and famous folk to the city. Schloss Elmslieb is Ropac′s private home and not open to the public.

http://GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC

Thaddeus Ropac
gallerist

Thaddeus Ropac, gallerist

Born in 1960. Klagenfurt, Austria. Lives between Paris, London and Salzburg.

In 1983, Thaddaeus Ropac founded his first gallery in Salzburg, specialising in European and North American contemporary art. Among the first exhibitions organised by the gallery in Salzburg were projects with German artists Joseph Beuys and Georg Baselitz, but also with younger, then-emerging American artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. The gallery now has six distinctive venues in London, Paris, Pantin, Salzburg and Seoul.

With a team of over 100, the gallery currently represents 70 artists and a number of renowned artist estates and shows at all major international art fairs. Active in both the primary and secondary markets, the gallery’s role extends to curatorial work, where it acts as a consultant to public institutions as well as an advisor to private and corporate collections. The gallery runs its own publishing house, producing catalogues and books to accompany exhibitions, inviting prominent international art historians, curators and writers to contribute.

Thaddaeus Ropac is a member of the advisory board of the Salzburg Festival as well as the University of Salzburg and founded the Austrian Friends of the Israel Museum. In 2013 he was accorded the Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur by the French president, François Hollande.

https://ropac.net/

SEAN SCULLY EXHIBIT: THE SHADOW OF FIGURATION

The Shadow of Figuration presents an exhibition of new works by the Irish-born American artist Sean Scully. Conceived for the gallery space in Salzburg, the exhibition brings together large-scale paintings from the artist’s most formative series – including Wall of Light and Landline – as well as a selection of watercolours. Alongside paintings and works on paper, a monumental sculpture titled Indoor Sleeper (2020) will be presented in the gallery’s outdoor space, offering an insight into Scully’s sculptural practice.

Reducing the pictorial plane and exploring different modalities of geometric forms in favor of purer images were the matters of pursuit undertaken by those artists involved with Minimalism back in the late 1960s and 1970s. The movement was primarily centered in the US, but it affected the practitioners living and working in other environments meaning it had an international resonance.

Sean Scully is one of them. In the first place, the Scottish artist found the mentioned framework easy to relate to and then tried to translate it to what he described as Emotional abstraction. Throughout the decades, he has developed a consistent body of work that is part of several museum collections worldwide.

This month, Scully, the lecturer, professor, writer, and twice Turner Prize nominee, returns to the public spotlight with an exhibition titled The Shadow of Figuration at Thaddaeus Ropac Galerie that will bring a selection of his most recent works.

Sean Scully

SEAN SCULLY: BIOGRAPHY

Over the course of his 50-year career, Sean Scully has created an influential body of work that has marked the development of contemporary abstraction. Fusing the traditions of European painting with the distinct character of American abstraction, his work combines painterly drama with great visual delicacy. Often structured around stripes or layered blocks of colour arranged on horizontal and vertical axes, the layers in his paintings attain a fine balance between calm reflection and an intrinsic vitality.

A forceful, physical artist, Scully creates intentionally compelling spaces, and his art is defined by acute concentration and care, involving constant negotiation between the monumental and the intimate. While giving primary importance to the physicality of the materials he employs, his art is commanded by the idea of humanity’s betterment, and at the heart of each rigorously composed work lies a near-infinite number of expressive, emotional fluctuations.

During a trip to Morocco in 1969, Scully was strongly influenced by the rich colours of the region, which he translated into the broad horizontal stripes and deep earth tones that characterise his mature style. Following fellowships in 1972 and 1975 at Harvard University, he permanently relocated to New York. In the early 1980s, he made the first of several influential trips to Mexico, where he used watercolour for the first time in works inspired by the patterns of light and shadows he saw on the stacked stones of ancient walls. The experience had a decisive effect on him and prompted his decision to move from Minimalism to a more emotional and humanistic form of abstraction.

Thaddeus Ropac
Sean Scully: The Shape of Figuration
Installation view

In 1998, following additional trips to Mexico, Scully began to create his landmark Wall of Light series. These works were shown in 2005–07 at The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In recent years, Scully has also increasingly turned to sculpture, creating monumental structures that engage with the unique energy and history of their locations. As in his paintings, these sculptures feature individual rectangular sections that slot together, maintaining his ongoing interest in interlocking brick forms.Born in Dublin, Scully studied at Croydon School of Art and Newcastle University in the UK, where he began experimenting with abstraction. His work has been exhibited in prestigious institutions worldwide, including the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery, London; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, among others. In 2015 he was the first Western artist to receive a major retrospective at the Shanghai Himalayas Museum and at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing.

https://ropac.net/artists/80-sean-scully/

Drawn to the Stillness of Landscape

https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/thaddaeus-ropac-sean-scully

Sean Scully
At Thaddeus Ropac Gallery

Scully has been acknowledged for his Wall of Light series, started in 1998, which functions as pictorial formations reminiscent of the brickwork of solid stone walls. A few examples of new works from this series will be contrasted to the ones from the Landline series started in 2013 based on a photograph Scully took in Norfolk. The work Landline Tierra Primavera (2022) is built around a warm palette evocative of European modernists such as Gustave Courbet, while the Landline Verdant Dark F.26.22 (2022) recalls the colors found in the landscapes by the Romantic painter by Caspar David Friedrich.

In recent years, the artist became more interested in sculpture, as seen in his 2021 solo exhibition at the Waldfrieden Sculpture Park in Wuppertal. Scully develops monumental structures that respond to the energy of their locations informed, as his paintings, by life.

Sean Scully Indoor Sleeper, 2020

The upcoming show is specially crafted to fit the Salzburg gallery. The visitors will be able to see large-scale paintings from the artist’s best-known series, a selection of watercolors, and a monumental sculpture titled Indoor Sleeper (2020) that will be installed in a public space in front of the gallery.

The works of Sean Scully  are a result of the mix of European painting traditions with the properties of American abstraction. Centered on horizontally or vertically arranged stripes or layered color blocks, the paintings in the exhibition showcase the artist’s ability to achieve balance, calmness, and vibrancy.

Sea˜Scully
Wall Landline Air

Scully has been acknowledged for his Wall of Light series, started in 1998, which functions as pictorial formations reminiscent of the brickwork of solid stone walls. A few examples of new works from this series will be contrasted to the ones from the Landline series started in 2013 based on a photograph Scully took in Norfolk. The work Landline Tierra Primavera (2022) is built around a warm palette evocative of European modernists such as Gustave Courbet, while the Landline Verdant Dark F.26.22 (2022) recalls the colors found in the landscapes by the Romantic painter by Caspar David Friedrich.

Sean Scully
Landline Tierra Primavera

In recent years, the artist became more interested in sculpture, as seen in his 2021 solo exhibition at the Waldfrieden Sculpture Park in Wuppertal. Scully develops monumental structures that respond to the energy of their locations informed, as his paintings, by life.

PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART: SEAN SCULLY: THE SHAPE OF IDEAS

The exhibition in Salzburg follows the critically acclaimed fifty-year retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA (until 31 July) and coincides with three further major institutional presentations of Scully’s works – at the Langen Foundation, Neuss, Germany (until 7 August); the Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Italy (until 9 October) and the Centre of Contemporary Art in Toruń, Poland (until 11 September).

Encounter the poetic sensibility and technical virtuosity of one of the leading abstract artists of our time. Sean Scully’s arresting paintings and works on paper, presented here in a comprehensive fifty-year retrospective, explore his signature stripes and reflect the artist’s bold experimentation with scale and composition. From the intimate to the monumental, the works on view stir the spirit and reveal Scully’s tireless dedication to the expressive power of painting.

Philadelphia Museum:
Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas