Celestial Mechanics: Form and Future in the Work of Gerhard Richter and Sean Scully

Born and raised during World War II and its immediate aftermath, Richter and Scully were both profoundly shaped by the conflicts of their time, resulting in a shared history of despair and dislocation that fueled their inner creative landscapes. Just as Richter left Communist Germany to capitalist Germany, Scully moved from Ireland to Britain just before Northern Ireland’s constitutional tensions, placing both under the culture of the “other”, familiar yet alien. Richter learnt Russian at school and watched Soviet theater and cinema. Indeed, his first achievement in painting was as a Social Realist artist, which soon led him to the dawn of his photo paintings. Scully went to art school in Britain and eventually reached the United States, where Minimalism was at the peak of its influence, staunchly maintaining his Irish identity and forging his own response to the currents of the art world around him.

Nevertheless, the drama of their life experiences and the sense of bewilderment and consequential introspection did not stop these artists from showing traces of joyful hope in their works. From Scully’s sumptuous planes in Untitled (Landline), 2022, to Richter’s pared-down grey masterpieces like Ohne Titel, 1970, and Ausschnitt (Grün- Grau), 1970, viewers are invited to peer into melancholic vistas, reminiscent of the evocative work of Caspar David Friedrich. Richter’s Sternbild, 1969, was painted at a time when confidence in the future of humanity coincided with man landing on the moon, yet his starry sky, devoid of its transcendental grandeur, is transformed into a painted space, based on the mechanical capture of light. In the same way, during a trip to Yucatan that inspired his Wall of Light series, Scully transformed the Mayan stone walls he encountered into broad, hovering planes of colour, altered by the reflection of ethereal light upon them.

This unprecedented, intelligently curated exhibition offers a fresh perspective and means by which to examine two seemingly disparate abstract masters and their trailblazing paths toward invention and innovation, ultimately finding a powerful rapport in the life trajectory and poignant investigations of these two brilliant minds.