Barcelona 23 August 2021
Controversy
The artist Sean Scully leaves Barcelona fed up with Catalanism and nationalism
The painter’s family has moved their residence to the French city of Aix-en-Provence
Irish-American artist Sean Scully /
MARC VILA (BCN)
The famous visual artist Sean Scully, born in Ireland and naturalized American, has left his home in Barcelona, ‹where he lived part of the year with his wife, the Swiss photographer Lilianne Tomasko, according to the painter himself in a report from the Financial Times. . Scully and his wife, who speak fluent Spanish, say they were forced to leave because of the city’s nationalistic climate. In Barcelona you went to meetings and they always spoke in Catalan as if to say ‘fucking you”, says the painter. Additionally, in that same article, she complains that the couple’s son, Oisin, a 12-year-old boy who attended school in Barcelona, ‹was told he should speak Catalan instead of Spanish during recess.
The 76-year-old artist, who has homes and studios in New York, London, Munich and Berlin, has complained about the pressure he claims to have suffered: “And in the end, in Barcelona I couldn’t stand that shit. “.
Scully and Tomasko have changed their residence in Barcelona for the French city of Aix-en-Provence. Nominated twice for the Turner Prize, the painter, who has exhibited in Europe and the United States, has work in such important museums as the Metropolitan, the MOMA and the Guggenheim in New York.
In 2015 he inaugurated a permanent space that bears his name in the chapel of the Monastery of Montserrat de Santa Cecilia. There are large mural paintings and stained glass windows in which the artist wanted to capture his connection with the monastery in a kind of spiritual inspiration that he has defined as aphasic. Likewise, Scully was in negotiations with Barcelona City Council in 2014. to donate 200 works in exchange for them being in his own artistic museum space; the negotiations did not work. It cannot be said, then, that Scully does not feel sympathy for Catalonia in general and Barcelona in particular. .
Scully’s style, difficult to define, is framed in a geometric and emotional abstraction based on vibrant colors and overlapping layers.