Tapestry

Round and round to the black square sun,
the soul is bobbined bare
and with its raging needle’s spun
life’s tapestry of air.

From copper ground to shoveled sky,
we weave from death to birth –
our knitted ghosts remystify
the slowed, unravelled earth.

Kelly Grovier

To celebrate the world renowned artist Sean Scully turning 80 this year Kerlin Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of new work.

The exhibition titled ‘Tapestry’ brings together four distinct bodies of work, each rooted in a deep engagement with the emotional potential of abstraction. It begins with a series of recent pencil-on-paper drawings, intimate in scale and delicately rendered. Alongside these are a number of hand-woven tapestries, produced in collaboration with master craftsmen at Mourne Textiles, where the drawn line is translated into fibre, texture, and weight. These are shown in conversation with new, large-scale paintings from the Stack series – shown here for the first time – these works merge drawing, painting and spray paint to create layered, muscular works that hover between architectural weight and painterly gesture. Completing the exhibition is a selection of new oil-on-copper paintings, smaller and more modest in scale but expansive in rich colour and emotional depth.

The exhibition highlights the way drawing functions as a foundational structure in Sean Scully’s work. Drawing is not treated here as a preliminary stage but as a generative discipline, one that underpins his paintings, informing his use of brush and spray paint, and extends into new textile works. Just as a tapestry is built thread by thread, Scully’s practice is constructed line by line: marks accumulate, interlock, and are layered into larger forms. Whether traced in pencil, painted or woven into undyed wool, drawing persists, intimate and monumental, fragile and enduring.