Author Description

"Mnuchin Gallery is pleased to present Guston/Morandi/Scully, an exhibition that will trace the visual affinities between Philip Guston (1913-1980), Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), and Sean Scully (b.1945). On view from September 8 until October 15, 2022, this presentation will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue authored by artist and critic, Phong Bui. The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once said, "if the young man had believed in repetition, what great things might have come from him, what inwardness he might have achieved in this life!" Indeed, it is through repetition that the present artists have been able to communicate their inner vision of the outside world: From the 1920s through the 1960s, Giorgio Morandi devoutly painted still lifes using a network of delicate and decisive strokes that sought to record the subtle, ephemeral tonalities of light and shade cast across his vessels. From the 1950s through the late 1960s, Philip Guston contributed to the New York School with abstract paintings that turned the grid-as-image into the grid-in-flux through loose brushwork and atmospheric colors that acted as a poignant metaphor for the instability of sight. Finally, through several series he's created over the last four decades, Sean Scully has continued to develop a lexicon of multi-layered blocks and bands of color that memorialize the essence of a particular place, person, or memory. Guston, Morandi, and Scully work in series and revisit the same motifs time and again, not to resolve the mystery of painting, but rather to relish in its paradoxical nature. By engaging with geometry, grids, and stripes they demonstrate how art attempts to bring order and structure to the temporal and ever-changing experience of seeing. Here, they seek to heighten the tension between the real and the perceived, the objective and the subjective, the material and the metaphysical. United in Guston/Morandi/Scully, the artists' personal mythologies and the sublime beauty of th