SEAN SCULLY: TOWER

LISSON GALLERY is pleased to present Tower, a solo exhibition by renowned painter Sean Scully featuring three interrelated bodies of work.

November 6, 2025 - January 24, 2026

The eponymous new series of Tower paintings represents a radical departure and a bold dismantling of his practice, each being formed from a concatenation of smaller, individual panels, seemingly employing different styles and diverse moments from his own painterly back catalogue.

Through the disorder and disjuncture of these tessellating panels, incorporating gaps, overlaps and holes, comes a newfound harmony and rhythm, that also references an earlier, spiritual era of art – such as the perspectival depth and world building found in Quattrocento Italy – as well as the rupture of modern art – in Analytic Cubism or Lucio Fontana’s pierced surfaces, for example.

Assembled from wood, felt and aluminum, the Tower works are inherently sculptural, featuring graffiti-esque spray paint, competing grids and flashes of road signs, which bring to mind the tumult of our high-rise, built environment.

A further series of paintings contrasts the monumental with the intimate, while a trio of stone sculptures acts as a pivot between the two. Across the display, Scully re-examines concepts that have shaped his five-decade career – the relationship between form and feeling, the emotive potential of abstraction, and the pitting of romantic ‘gesture’ against an aesthetic of impersonality.

In eight paintings on copper, Scully has arranged gestural sweeps of jostling color into tiered bands and tentative grids, suggestive of both turbulence and containment. The metallic surface is both redolent of industry and the earth, because, as Scully points out, “The paintings have a relationship with the elemental world.”