Sean Scully: Bodies of Lights

The Fundacion Juan March presents this bilingual edition of Sean Scully's essay, Bodies of Light, as a supplementary publication accompanying the exhibition, The Abstraction of Landscape: From Northern Romanticism to Abstract Expressionism, on view in Madrid from October 5th, 2007, to January 13, 2008. The essay was first published in Spanish in the magazine Pasajes (Valencia). In Bodies of Light, therefore, Scully unites the artists who begin and end our exhibition and does it with specific reference to the proposal by Robert Rosenblum that inspired it: that of the existence of a line that connects the Romantic sublime of 19th-century Northern Europe with the American abstract sublime of the 20th century. It is perhaps no coincidence that Scully himself - an abstract painter born in Northern Europe (Dublin, Ireland, 1945), who became an American citizen in 1983, and lives in New York - shares biographical traits with that lengthy history.