A square painting called Blue Wall hangs in the gallery, its surface streaked with intercrossing rectangles in different shades of blue, richly brushed, thick and riverine. But there are gaps showing warm woody red beneath calming waters. It’s an abstract painting, a minimalist one even, yet there’s a rawness suggesting heartfelt narratives, barely contained feelings, kept just about in check behind the blue facade.
In this little essayistic exhibition, Blue Wall’s creator, the abstract artist Sean Scully, lets you into his life with unguarded passion. At the other end of the room, he exposes what his abstract art sublimates and transfigures in a recent self-portrait. It’s an innocent, honest attempt to look in the mirror and see himself, sitting at home in front of one of his big striped canvases, the colours of his clothes bouncing against it. Scully seems to be in a state of artistic flux and a mood of self-scrutiny, not just “mirroring” himself, as the exhibition title has it, in that self-portrait, but imagining a counterlife in which an artist famous for a very recognisable style of abstract painting is a drawer of cups and a portraitist of family life.
I don’t think about it. I just do it, with no thought about ambition or result … it’s pure feelingSean Scully
His model for this foray into small pictures of the big thing we call everyday life is the Italian still life artist Giorgio Morandi. A wall of prints and drawings by Morandi faces a wall of Scully works in a room the size of a large bedroom. You can see why he loves Morandi and identifies with him: the Italian painted with precision and restraint, repeating slight variants on arrangements of bottles and cups at his quiet home in Bologna from the 1920s to the 1960s. Works here include one in which Morandi dares to draw a bunch of broccoli.
There is no getting to the bottom of them. And in the same way, if you find the regular fields of rectangular colour Scully has been painting for more than four decades tranquil, you haven’t been looking closely enough. They flow with sensitivity, blaze with memory. Whether you see them as ploughed Irish fields (he was born in Dublin) or metropolitan structures (he grew up in London), his lines, his trenches or planks of colour, are hard won, dug up. Here he lets you see where he digs, in sketches full of fierce, free emotion.
Innocent and honest … The Artist by Sean Scully. Photograph: Courtesy Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art
There is a loving watercolour of his son and a beach scene of a mother and child entitled Madonna. Among these small slices of Scully’s life, and heart, are designs for abstract compositions in which you can see the process by which his heaving passion is transformed into disciplined painting.
Both Scully and Morandi seem to follow Cézanne’s advice to “treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone”. That pull of geometry is plain to see in Morandi’s works, such as his 1931 etching Various Objects on a Table. It also emerges in Scully’s 2025 ink sketch of a glass on a table: while the base of the glass is barely curved at all, its top rim shapes a near perfect circle, as if it is slipping before your eyes from the real world of observed appearances into the abstract realm of absolute geometries. Now that’s what Cézanne was talking about. The rim of a mug, also drawn last year, becomes an even more perfect and unhesitant circle.
Yet when I once asked Scully about Cézanne, he made it clear he loves and reveres Van Gogh more. It’s not just his commitment to expressing raw feeling through colour, nor the echo of Vincent in his intense, uninhibited self-portrait. He also provides, above a sketched abstract square, a scribbled manifesto for his art: “I don’t think about it. I just do it, with no thought about ambition or result … it’s pure feeling.” His forceful, thickly drawn landscape sketches nearby have the authenticity of Van Gogh, or Constable, or Auerbach. You look from these ardent rough drawings to his abstract designs and see, and feel, the poetry of memory, all the suffering and desire that a nest of rectangles can hold.
If you still need convincing, Scully takes the transformation the other way and adds figuration to one of his abstract works. In his 2023 print White Rose, against layered rectangles of black and greyish white, lies a flower thrown down as if at a funeral. It could be corny but isn’t, as the modernist painter confesses the sheer universality and heartbreaking directness of what he wants to say.
There’s only one problem with this honest, intimate show. Scully kills the artist he loves. The freedom and restlessness of his living art makes Morandi’s work seem almost sterile. On this occasion, there’s no comparison between the finished works of a dead artist and the flowing energy of one who is still making it anew.
Sean Scully: Mirroring is at the Estorick Collection, London, until 23 November
