Recently declared the “greatest living abstract painter,“ Sean Scully’s Tower paintings offer more radical reinvention and bold dismantling of his practice. These are paintings of allegorical force, in tessellating panels of wood, felt and aluminum, spray paint, competing grids, flashes of road signs. Just as the broken shards of Cubism at the beginning of the twentieth century reflected anxiety wrought of industrial change and the First World War’s impending doom, the manic fractures of Scully’s Towers reflect current anxieties a century later. In their disorder and disjuncture they are towers of Babel, 25 years after 9/11 and the collapse of the World Trade Center a few blocks from the artist’s studio, asking us whether our society can ever be reconstructed, or if the joy is to be found in the tumult.
