Theresa Thompson enjoys what is a ‘bold show’ for Christ Church

‘I would like people to take their time to see what has happened here on this canvas,” said curator Jacqueline Thalmann, joining me in front of one of the key works in the Sean Scully Encounters show at Christ Church Picture Gallery. “The light showing through, the layering, the other colours you see coming through, the brushstrokes, rhythms, relationships... you see other things when you give an artwork time, when you spend time standing in front of it. You have to make the effort.”

I stood for some minutes looking at Sean Scully’s Dark Wall, 2006, eyes flitting between the large contemporary abstract and an even larger 16th- century canvas hung only inches away: the famous genre scene by Annibale Carracci of The Butcher’s Shop. Absorb-ing the colours and shapes of one and both, I began to notice how a pale orange light seemed to seep through cracks between the brick-shaped blocks of Scully’s oil on linen work, and how its shades of midnight and shadow, its depths and complexities echoed those in the Italian market scene.

This is a bold show for Christ Church. It’s also, as Thalmann says, “a big thing for Oxford”. Scully has been described as the ‘greatest living abstract painter’ and has twice been nominated for the Turner Prize (in 1989 and 1993, losing out with Lucien Freud and Paula Rego to Richard Long, and second time round, to Rachel White-read).

Dublin-born Scully’s work is held in numerous public collections around the world. Now living and working in New York and Barcelona, he shows 11 paintings and 33 prints at Christ Church, his first exhibition in Oxford.

It is clear from these 44 works that strips, blocks and grids are the pillars of Scully’s visual language. Subtle gradations of colour, texture and form play across the works, whether in intriguingly titled individual paintings like Cradle or Desire, or a series (Ten Towers, or Heart of Darkness), whether in works on paper of more understated appeal (shown in the subdued light of the print room for protection), or oils displayed “in direct dialogue” with 16th-century masterpieces in the main gallery.

This is curatorship of the first order. Conceived and curated by Thalmann, the Picture Gallery’s curator since 2003, and Kelly Grovier, poet, art critic, and former Christ Church graduate student, they have done a superb job with a potentially difficult show. It takes someone who really understands a collection to see the potential in aligning works that are seemingly poles apart to such good effect. For example, the siting of Scully’s Abend is a masterstroke: its sombre notes echo elements of the adjacent Old Masters, from Jacopo Bassano’s dark Christ Crowned with Thorns, to Zuccarelli’s shadowy Romantic Landscape, to the plum colours and greys of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ bewigged General Guise, whose bequest formed the nucleus of Christ Church’s collection.

Similarly, Scully’s Yellow Robe Red Figure looks perfectly at ease in a cor-ner at the far end of the gallery hung beside Jacopo Bertoia’s Mars, Hercules, Bacchus, and Jupiter. And both the lines and rhythm of Falling Dark, an irregular mélange of blood reds and greys with central lighter patch and inlay hanging unaccompanied in the corridor, and the Passenger Line series seem to match the emphatically modern design of the 1960s gallery.

Scully’s often monumental abstracts are traditionally shown in the white-walled spaces of modern art galleries, where they take over the spaces, undis-turbed by other masters. Here too they fare very well, and without detriment to either Italian masters or the gallery’s intrinsic tranquillity. The newcomers sit courteously alongside the oldies, the newer taking cues from the old, and vice versa: the unexpected pairings or groupings throw spotlights on both.

Scully makes us look that little deeper. Even if people find it initially difficult to see abstract works in amongst Old Masters, the trick is to give it time, to allow relationships between old and new to build.

Sean Scully Encounters: A New Master among Old Masters
Christ Church Picture Gallery
Until August 31