“I approach drawing and printmaking as a recording process akin to and inspired by early photography and musical recordings. These early recordings allow us to not only experience the intention of the makers, what they thought and how they felt, but also the errant details of the atmospheric conditions in which they were made. Those marks beyond their control. Together, the limitation of technology and the weight of time produce artifacts of otherworldly tone and mystery. The process I employ attempts to invite similar unknowns. The drawings themselves are relatively simple in structure and execution. They are made quickly with a ballpoint pen, a ruler, and a homemade version of large scale carbon paper (oil paint applied to paper). The result is a primitive transfer process that ‘records’ in oil paint, not only the intended lines of the drawing, the ideas themselves, but just as importantly, the unpredictable marks of chance.”
Sean Sullivan

Resulting from a process located between painting, drawing, and monoprint, Sean Sullivan’s (b. 1975, Bronx, NY) works on Japanese print-making paper create a dense yet playful world of abstract forms and layers that highlight failures as beautiful irritations. As inner architectures which are softly troubled by geometric shapes in yellow, pink, brown, grey, and red color that equally echoes the traces of 20th-century design traditions, early abstract Modernism, as well as historic printmaking techniques.
Oil stick transferred to paper through a hybrid process located between drawing and printmaking here questions the idea of a fixed, error-free process of image creation and visualizes the resulting image as something in formation. A reservoir of sublime visual poetry that ignores, synchronizes, and manipulates its marks only to reunite them – much like a beautiful vague memory – in new and mesmerizing ways.
Sullivan’s works on paper determine their own truth. A world that marvelously resists classification and that uses its formal vocabulary of pink suns, green square-like shapes, and light blue dots to intertwine, overlap, or re-form their multilayered meanings into (mis-)information. Into ambivalent symbols of an own shimmering reality.
Philip Fernandes do Brito

Sean Sullivan (b. 1975, Bronx, NY) lives and works in Hudson Valley, NY.
Recent solo exhibitions include Isthmus in formation, Linn Lühn, Düsseldorf, 2024; Excitations (drawings of concern), Et Al., San Francisco, 2023; Faith in Doubt, Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles, 2023; In the shade of a tree, Devening Projects, Chicago, 2023; and Elegysome, Feuilleton, Los Angeles, 2020.
Recent group exhibitions include Hudson Valley Artists 2024: Bibliography, The Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz, 2024; lucent, Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen; Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda; Wexford Arts Centre, Wexford; The Levinsky Gallery, Plymouth, 2023; A Minor Constellation, Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles, 2022; Feelings are Facts, Poker Flats, Williamstown, 2021; Three Painters, The Arts Center at Duck Creek, East Hampton, 2020; Slow and Everywhere Like Breath, Markus Luettgen Gallery, Düsseldorf, 2020; and Solitude, Shrine Gallery, New York, 2020.