Sean Scully at MAMbo—Museum of Modern Art of Bologna

June 22–October 9, 2022

From June 22 through October 9, 2022, the Sala delle Ciminiere of the MAMbo—Museum of Modern Art of Bologna will host A Wound in a Dance with Love, a significant retrospective of Sean Scully, one of the foremost practitioners of contemporary painting.

The Sean Scully: Passenger—A Retrospective exhibition, which was organized by the Museum of Fine Arts—Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest (October 14, 2020, to May 30, 2021), and was later hosted by the Benaki Museum in Athens, is the inspiration for the exhibition, which was curated by Lorenzo Balbi with Dublin’s Kerlin Gallery serving as the main partner.

It arrives to Bologna in an updated version that was created especially for the MAMbo. In 1996, the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, from which the MAMbo is descended, dedicated an exhibition to the artist in its Villa delle Rose facilities. 26 years later, the artist is once again the star of a solo exhibition in Bologna.

Scully’s painting combines a thorough understanding of the works of both classic and modern masters with a unique instinct for drawing emotional and aesthetic cues from reality.

By looking back over 50 years of artistic experience, the show in Bologna, which features 68 pieces (oil paintings, acrylics, watercolors, sketches, and a massive sculpture), intends to illustrate the ongoing interplay between these two crucial elements of the artist’s work.

A Wound in a Dance with Love charts the key advancements in a practice that is always true to its presumptions but also capable of undergoing significant change over time in response to emotional experiences, existential evolutions, affections, and sorrows. It begins with the earliest figurative experiments in the 1960s and ends with the most recent work.

A catalogue titled Sean Scully: A Wound in a Dance with Love (Edizioni MAMbo, 2022) that contains all of the artwork’s pictures as well as a number of other pieces by the artist to accompany the essays is provided with the exhibition. The book begins with an exclusive interview with Sean Scully conducted by Lorenzo Balbi, which can be thought of as a “small exhibition/text” because the artist responds to each question with a piece of art, and then it moves on to essays by David Fehér, Raphy Sarkissian, and Danilo Eccher. It concludes with an important text by Scully from 2005, Giorgio Morandi: Resistance and Persistence, which is presented here for the first time in its Italian

Sean Scully, who was born in 1945 in Dublin, Ireland, now divides his time between New York and Bavaria where he lives and works.