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Open: Tue-Sat 11am-6pm

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Artist: Sean Scully

Lisson presents acclaimed artist Sean Scully’s first solo exhibition in Shanghai since his landmark survey in 2014, Follow the Heart: The Art of Sean Scully 1964–2014, at the Shanghai Himalayas Museum—which marked him as the first Western artist to receive a career-spanning retrospective in China. Scully returns with new works from his celebrated Landline series, where broad horizontal stripes evoke the natural horizon. This presentation follows recent institutional exhibitions in China, including Away From The Sea at He Art Museum, Shunde (2024), and Sublime and Sunyata at the Art Museum of Sichuan Conservatory of Music (2025).

Sean Scully’s Landline works are largely inspired by his years in Ireland, particularly his time looking out to the sea. The architectural qualities of landscapes unfold to reveal the physical and emotional dimensions of experience and memory. With thick, gestural brushstrokes and loose bands of colour, the Landline paintings show Scully’s transition away from his earlier hard-edged minimalism to a more expressive style that elicits the beauty and brilliance of the natural world, which at once bring to the colour fields of classic European paintings, and a more organic approach to the stripes. With gestures evoking the land, sea, and sky, as well as the indistinct lines between them, the works navigate the elemental relationships that compose our world, and in doing so reveal the sublime character of these interactions.

Scully’s tendency to layer dark over light, light over dark is a constant across different mediums he employs. In Landline Rouge (2026), this layering produces an evocative sense of depth, anchoring the bold, abstracted stripes of colour to a specificity of place and time. The layering and merging of oil pigments in coloured bands—rich wine red, navy blue, bleached ochre, sliver grey and scarlet red—across the panel’s aluminium surface, suggest points between nature and architecture in a quiet, understated hamlet of centuries-old wood-frame and stone houses. While in oil on copper Landline See Moon (2025), different shades of blue stripes combine to form a nocturnal palette, whose edges sway against one another and mingle softly, invoking the hazy moonlight refracted and reflected as it ascends over a darkening sea.

The translation of the Landlines motif from its typically large panel onto a more intimate scale can be seen in a group of watercolours on paper, including Landline 6.21.26 and Landline 6.20.26 (both 2026), which are marked by the vista with bands of greens, yellows and blues. Another work on paper Union 6.16.26 (2026) is a result of Scully’s further experimentation with the stripe in the late 1980s, where he combined colour bands with compositional structures such as the checkerboard and the inset. The work configured three groups of stripes in different widths, orientations and colours, to create a sense of wholeness, as title suggests.

From 10 – 15 November, coinciding with the presentation at Lisson Shanghai, Scully presents a special display of three large-scale Tower paintings at the nearby Capitol Theatre Building, an important site where Hollywood film companies established branch offices during their early entry into China. Marking the series’ China debut, the Tower works radically reimagine Scully’s practice through concatenated panels of wood, felt, and aluminum. These sculptural paintings fuse disparate styles—graffiti spray, grids, and road signs—with gaps and overlaps that evoke both Quattrocento perspective and modern ruptures like Analytic Cubism. This tension between cohesion and fracture creates a rhythmic harmony, channeling the tumult of urban high-rises while allegorically echoing ambitious structures like the World Trade Center and the Tower of Babel, bridging demise and reconstruction.

all images © the gallery and the artist(s)