Bricklayer of the Soul

A presentation of the art of Sean Scully from “Walls of Light” to the chapel of Santa Cecilia

With Fr. Paul ANEL, Art Director, Hearts Home, and Sean SCULLY, (via video), Artist

Presented by Crossroads Cultural Center

Born in Dublin in 1945, artist Sean Scully has come a long way from his troubled youth in the suburbs of London to his 2008 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (“Walls of Light”). Arthur Danto famously wrote that “his name belongs on the shortest of short lists of major painters of our time.” While his paintings consist almost exclusively of stripes, Sean Scully is not an abstract painter. His compositions relate to the walls of Aran in his native Ireland, and to the time-washed façades of the makeshift houses he photographed in slums and favelas. Sean Scully found in this achitectural vocabulary a possibility to save abstraction from Puritanism and emptiness and “to reconnect it to the realm of human experience.” Asked about the exclusive use of horizontals and verticals in his paintings, Sean Scully responded that the horizontal stands for the infinite horizon and the vertical for the position of man in front of the infinite.

The year 2015 was a major breakthrough for Sean Scully. His work was honored at the Venice Biennale, and he had a large retrospective touring Chinese museums (making him the first-ever western artist to receive such recognition), and he completed his “most important installation to date”: Santa Cecilia, a Romanesque chapel located on the sacred mountain of Montserrat, in Spain, a work which he undertook as a token of friendship to a benedictine monk.A member of the Catholic movement Heart’s Home and a minister to the artists of New York City, Father Paul Anel has been a personal friend of the artist since 2008. In June 2015 he celebrated the inaugural mass in Santa Cecilia. He will give us a personal account of the artist’s journey from his “walls of light” to his masterpiece of sacred architecture, a journey of longing, friendship and faith, where contemporary art proves it still has the capacity to surprise and uplift.

The event is free and open to the public.

About this Event

Date: Wednesday, May 18, 2016
Time: 7pm
Location: Crossroads Auditorium
125 Maiden Lane, 15th Floor, NY, NY
(ID required to enter the building)
map

About the Speakers

Fr. Paul Anel
Art Director, Hearts Home

Sean Scully
Artist (via video)

Invitation

Download here.

Video

Part I
Part II
Q&A

Photos - click on image below